Barbara Januszkiewicz

Barbara Januszkiewicz emerged as a formidable contemporary artist during the early 1990s. Her work has been influenced by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and other Avant-garde Pop artists. Yet her professional training was under the Chinese master Mun Quan, a traditional watercolorist. Januszkiewicz developed her own fusion style. She began her career as a gallery fine artist, accepting assignments wherever possible to support art education and art reach. Her signature style in both oils and watercolors helped her to become a unique creative voice and colorist among her peers. Januszkiewicz moves from subjects such as coffee and donuts to simple Zen landscapes, similar to a classical performer performing a range of styles. This seemingly endless line of subject matter ranges from crowded city streets to extreme close-ups of pastries and cafeteria foods, from bicycle spokes to Ferris wheels and fog. Her motivation and expression for depicting these everyday objects is quite different from that of her Pop Art contemporaries. While Warhol and his followers often employed satire to point out America’s dependence on consumer goods, a feeling of nostalgia, not commercialism, characterizes the body of Januszkiewicz’s art. She paints the majority of her works from memory in an attempt to reflect on relationships of color and design while staying on the edge of realism. Her paintings float between conceptual reality and the limits of her media. In her later works, Januszkiewicz captures movement and expression with optical illusions and bright hues. Her series of musical notations are based on jazz with a geometric and color fixation. These compositions gradually become more structured in a series of musical notations while at the same time keeping a loose and flowing touch. Januszkiewicz style has evolved over her career, but her unwavering favorable portrayal of Americanism continues to be the characteristic that separates her from her peers. Her work can be found in many collections: www.Barbaraj.info.