In Memoriam: for My Sister (1954-2020)
From the time my sister Janet was a baby, I was eager to hear what she had to say. I tried to get her to speak, bending over her crib trying to coax a word or two from her. She pulled my hair instead and looked at me with her big blue eyes, choosing to remain silent. She would not speak until she had something to say. Her excited exclamations (delivered in complete sentences) at first sight of our new puppy both relieved and delighted us. As her personality developed, her talents emerged, and I became convinced there was nothing my little sister couldn’t do. Janet, organizing a dog show on our barking front lawn; Janet, illustrating all her homework and wondering why I didn’t do it too; Janet, sewing yet another activity badge on the sash of her Brownie uniform. She was competitive but not a show-off: she would challenge whoever tried to take her orchestra seat, but a violin recital, even with me right there on stage accompanying her, was more pain than pleasure. Still, we excitedly unwrapped each day to see what came next.
Of course, life was not simply a series of gifts. Between our father’s death and our mother’s Alzheimer’s, Janet learned all there is to know of absence. “My art is autobiographical,” she wrote. "Themes of pursuing vision — trying to see what blocks understanding; entrapment; relationships between people — are all subjects for my work...." ‘Mysterious’ and ‘haunting’ were the words most often used to describe her work. Also, macabre, comic, and subtly erotic. Her images seemed to be drawn from the subconscious, from a zone of Great Silence, wherein time gets trapped and stunned into colorful shapes of enigma and longing, foreboding and regret, all vying for prominence . Janet has gone silent now. At last she is at peace, leaving those of us who grieve her passing with the memories she gave us, the generous good that she did, the dream she kept alive, and a single enduring image: a woman with a painter’s palette in her hand. Like a character in a Woolf novel, she might have said, “It was done. It was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”
SPECTRALLYRE.WORDPRESS.COMJanet Snell — painter of the Great SilenceSome paintings are quiet vortexes. I don’t mean depictions of spiraling maelstroms. Rather, some paintings are an implicit swirling and blending of the emotional into the metaphysical. That v…hers
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