Subtleties of art

For Lynchburg native Janet Dance, art has been a thread that’s run through her entire life.

“It weaves a very full life,” says Dance, whose work recently received an honorable mention at the Virginia Artists 2009 Juried Exhibition in Hampton.

“An interest in art keeps you from being boxed in and gives you a lot of creative options,” she adds.

“My daughter says it has really helped her, just venturing out into the world. She says she always hears my voice, ‘Use your creative resources. There’s always more than one way to do things.’”

For Dance, that full life began in the Hill City, where her passion for the arts was ignited at a young age. She was drawing as young as 4 years old, on a walnut drawing table her father built, and she joined the Lynchburg Art Club at 16.

She later attended the Rhode Island School of Art, but left early to start a family with her physicist husband, Kirk.

During their 51 years together, Dance and her husband have moved nine times, living in cities like Chicago, New York and Cincinnati. All the while, she never stopped painting and says a love of art helped her make connections in each new city.

“I usually had a place I went once a week to take a class with some friends. I would find a niche,” says Dance.

“Some people look for churches. I look for art groups.”

While they were living in Pennsylvania, she went back to school and completed a degree in elementary education at Penn State, which led to a career teaching fourth grade and, later, special education.

Kirk’s next job brought the family to Cincinnati, where Dance got her MBA at Xavier University and worked at Cincinnati Bell Telephone Company after their two kids, Karen and Bill, went off to college.

The couple lived in Cincinnati for 15 years before moving back home to retire in 1987.

Since then, Dance says she and Kirk have fallen into a daily routine, swimming laps in their pool every afternoon and taking their dogs for a walk, down to a creek where they like to play, each evening after dinner.

Nature is her biggest inspiration, and those walks provide it in spades.

“I stand there watching (the dogs), thinking about the lights and shadows and shapes.”

Dance paints in her studio, a small building behind the main house that has lots of windows that look out onto their wooded Bedford property.

She describes her work as “abstractions taken from the environment around me.”

“I’m trying to project what I really appreciate about the beauty of this area,” she adds, “before it all becomes condos.”

Dance works big, too, usually on canvases that are 3 feet by 5 feet, because “I like putting my whole body into it,” she says.

She paints with oils, but has recently started incorporating graphite and beeswax into her work.

“New art is trying to be edgy,” she says. “The edge now is stuff. You have to add stuff to (the canvas) to make it more interesting. It pushes you.”

For her, the wax, which she mixes with paint, “builds a surface. It gives a sort of velvety texture you can move around with a palate knife.”

Dance isn’t one to use bright, bold hues in her work, instead opting for earthy tones.

“I like the colors that are in nature, which are not primary colors,” she says. “I like the subtleties of that.”