Many-Horizons, 2018. Acrylic on canvas - Janet r Boddy

As a painter, Janet r. Boddy’s work has always excited my interest.

Her divergent, exploratory, multiform images have never been easy to categorise. 

She has rarely worked to any given formula or tradition, preferring instead to examine and develop new ways of constructing a pictorial space.

The scope of her subjects range from a examination of nature, still life and portraiture transformed through an expressive abstraction.

After recovering from intermittent illnesses she was forced to reassess her work once again and to set her trajectory on a new path of development. 

The progression has been exemplary and sees her once again reemerge as a painter with a potent and expressive imagination.

Much of her work uses drawing and painting as a way of constructing full-blooded shapes and forms in space, setting them shifting and drifting through an illusion of pictorial depth and containing the whole within a convincing unifying composition. 

Other work sees how content has become form, where her work is clearly replenished by her contact with nature and natural forms.

This balance of form and content within her work alludes to and symbolises a concern with her ‘inner’ experience which transfigures and transforms her painting through her ‘outer’ experience.

All these elements and motifs are contained through her compositional skills into an aesthetic unity which appears whole and convincing.

Michael Montague – M.A. fine arts, U.K. Art Historian