Paintings

Prior to making illuminated art with LEDs, Janet was creating brightly colored geometric patterns with acrylic paint on canvas. Many of these pieces are executed in a hard-edge colorist style, where each region within the painting is a uniform color, and the regions are separated by sharp boundaries. The layouts were designed by many methods, ranging from pencil sketches to computer generated meshes. Color choices often involved placing opposing pairs from the color wheel in adjacent regions, for increased visual contrast.

Blue LEDs and RGB LEDs did not become widely available (or affordable) until the late 1990s, around the time when Janet began creating illuminated wearable art. In the decades since then, significant advances in LED and microcontroller technology have made it possible to produce complex color changing patterns with lights embedded within various materials.

Several of these early paintings are used as inspiration in Janet's more recent work, including her series of color shifting framed art. Hex Box 1 reproduces part of the grid in Open Hexagonal Lattice 1, but adds color changes with animated lights.

Reproductions of many of these paintings are available through FineArtAmerica.com and Pixels.com.