Janet Stafford

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

I have always worked in series—streams of thoughts and desires common to us all, represented by images. I see the images as signs of the material world. At first my series were narrative, encompassing quotidian aspects such as romantic love and building construction. And I considered ideas—enlightenment, science, memory. Now I am thinking about nature and our planet. For my series, I think for a while about what I want to talk about, then I photograph that idea and use those photographs as the basis for eight to twenty paintings, all of which have typically been on one or two supports. The series I am working on now, Natural History, comprises thirty-three separate canvases. The Natural History paintings can function as a sign of nature. One of the paintings can stand for the entire series. One of the paintings can be scanned and made smaller or larger. A painting could be an image projected onto a wall or other surface. As I work on Natural History, I also make other, smaller paintings. For a long time, I have been working on the Natural History paintings. It is a slow process. The paintings are all based on photographs of trees that I have taken, photos that I have laid out in a pattern that represents a Fibonacci series of numbers. So, it is planned. The Natural History project is unnatural, of course, but it reminds us of the existence of nature, a memento. It has beauty, too, but not the beauty of nature or a real forest. It is more a sign of a forest, a sign of...

Artwork