Press Release For Immediate Release
New exhibition: March 1 – April 20, 2019
Reception: Friday evening, March 1, 6:30 – 8:00, public invited
Strange Legacy – new paintings by Janna Watson
Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present Canadian artist Janna Watson and her first solo show with the gallery.
Janna Watson is a young artist who has quickly made an impression on the contemporary art scene. Her abstract compositions and energetic brushstrokes possess an elegant and powerful vitality. A masterful colorist, Watson juxtaposes analogous colors against “difficult” and disharmonious hues resulting in a taut and carefully balanced abstract works. She creates energetic, often precarious tension with her deliberate and confident marks and the spontaneous drips and gestures that are artifacts of her intuitive process. Watson paints on birch panel, often letting the wood grain become another active element in her composition. The notion of spiritual alignment is central to Janna Watson’s practice and shapes the artist’s formal concerns with light, color, and space in her paintings. "Qì" is converted through color choices and unified with Watson’s gesture.
This exhibition Strange Legacy is a homage to Arthur Bonnet. Bonnet was Janna Watson’s grandfather, mentor and muse. His teachings are ever-present in Watson’s studio practice, the faint echo of his urging to “make it wilder’ continues to guide her hand and heart.
Watson’s paintings can be found in several significant collections, including in the Toronto collections of TD Bank Financial Group, CIBC, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the HBC Global Art Collection in New York. In 2017, she was selected to create a mural-size painting for the feature space in AURA, North America’s largest condominium building. Watson earned a BFA in Drawing and Painting from Ontario College of Art and Design, Toronto, ON. The artist lives and works in Toronto, Canada.
