Author Biography

Forty-six years ago, after graduating from Yale University Art School in 1964 (MFA), Janet Alling had a revelation that she would devote her career to expressing aesthetic statements through flowers. Her mission was to redefine flower painting as an important subject matter essential in the history of painting and in contemporary art.Painting first in watercolors and then in oils, her main interest was the process of painting from direct observation of plants in natural light. The constant changing of passing daylight on leaves as they moved towards it fascinated and challenged her. She wanted to capture the strength of these living forms – the muscularity of stems and the shapes and patterns of leaves as she sought to portray the essence of each flower, leaf, and tree.The results are not conventional, but come from much perceiving and thinking. Alling's paintings are a development and progression of formal visual ideas, color exploration, light, composition, scale, and the phenomena of the natural world.Using close observation and magnified forms, she worked on a large-scale. Her first one-woman show at 55 Mercer in 1972 was enthusiastically reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl, in the Sunday New York Times, Roberta Smith in Art News, and others who identified Alling as a painter to watch among the generation of realist painters working in large scale perception of reality: Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein and Jane Freilicher, She currently lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.

Review

What is surprising about Janet Alling's beautiful paintings of plants is not their possession of the personal and poetic …but their power.    -Peter Schjeldahl, The New York Times

Long Description

Unanticipated is a career retrospective monograph that includes 248 images of both painting and drawing, along with 17,500 words of text.In 1964, Janet Alling studied among a legendary generation of artists, including Chuck Close, Jennifer Bartlett, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Janet Fish, Rackstraw Downs, and Brice Marden. They turned contemporary art making into a revolution of material, scale, subject, and perception.Alling, sensing both her affinity and difference with fellow students, found her subject in flowers. She was eager to investigate their essence and power and redefine a category of painting regarded as decorative and conventional. A glance at this compendium of flower painting from a long career of observation and honed technique, reveals Alling's vision as anything but conventional. Large-scale leaves and petals shimmering in shadows and light fill these 96 pages with unexpected color and pattern and mysterious beauty. Artist Alex Katz says about her work, "[Her} flowers are decorous, contained, and make no overture to fashion. The mystery of meaning reminds me of Emily Dickinson."Alling captures the process of painting a natural subject in natural light and in time's inexorable grasp. The glories of the iris, the tulip, and the coleus are amplified and newly perceived by Alling's brush. She has achieved what she set out to do nearly 60 years ago: Redefine flower painting as an essential subject for contemporary art. This book is the story of a female artist who began working during a period when art was "a man's world." In Unanticipated the artworks are organized to draw the reader into Alling's life narrative and its relation to the unfolding of her attraction to the natural world as a subject for advanced fine art. Her schooling at Yale, as well as travel to the world's most renowned artistic achievements, along with mentorship by some of the most important male artists of the era, set her on her mission to revolutionize flower painting. The book's contents feature key works of flower portraits, gardens, and patterns. A final selection includes a catalog raisonne, with images her complete repertoire of paintings and drawings.

Review Quote

What is surprising about Janet Alling's beautiful paintings of plants is not their possession of the personal and poetic ...but their power. -Peter Schjeldahl, The New York Times

Description for Sales People

In the same vein as The Tulip: The Story of a Flower That Has Driven Men Mad by Anna Pavord (Bloomsbury; 1999)

Details