Janice Marin's artistic practice explores shape, line, and color. Her oil paintings merge abstract geometric and organic forms with identifiable elements, creating a dreamlike memoir.
Marin’s paintings start as a sketchbook study where decisions and edits are made regarding framing, layering, and color palette. Images and colors are sourced from her personal stories, events, and experiences. She is interested in the mark-making that results from revealing the underpainting, how scraping into paint blurs the distinction between “painting” and “drawing.” Each mark results from carefully reimagining, removing, and abstracting the form.
Her grandmother taught her how to paint with watercolors when she was five years old, and that is when she first fell in love with painting. This is one of her core memories. Her grandmother was an artist-educator in San Rafael, Mendoza, in Argentina. Marin’s grandmother taught her how to look and see the shapes, pointing out the details with her hands and leading her small hand in response to the lines. Those experiences inform Marin’s practice to this day.
Marin’s paintings and drawings are the persistence in the present, the constant renewal of place, and a shifting belonging. Through painting and drawing, she distills visual cues that are both familiar and untrodden. Marin received a BFA from The Ontario College of Art and Design University (Toronto, Canada) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago, IL).
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Inquiries for paintings, drawings, & commissions please email janicegmarin@gmail.com.