Interview with Katie Bonadies, November 2024
Jaclyn Janis is a printmaker who also does some drawing. She has been a member at Running With Scissors since June 2024.
Jaclyn is currently at work carving a large Shina plywood block. The block is the largest Jaclyn has ever made (30x48”). It’s a part of Big Ink, a traveling printmaking program founded by a Maine printmaker where participants complete a masterclass via an online learning center with 2-3-minute tutorials before carving their blocks. Then Big Ink drives its mobile press–called the “Big Tuna”–to meet with workshop participants in different cities around the country for two days of printing. “You can start from zero experience and learn to do woodblock relief printmaking…. It guides you through developing an idea and transferring that image to the block. Then you stain the block and carve.” Jaclyn’s print will be made at Sanctuary Arts in Eliot, Maine on Saturday, November 2, 2024. Public viewing hours will be held in the afternoon that day.
Jaclyn signed up for Big Ink with her friends from her studio at the Torpedo Factory in Virginia, who she still meets with virtually to set art goals and share updates. She is very thankful for the teachers she worked with there through the Art League where the classes were affordable and accessible. “I didn’t want to live in DC, and I found this total gem that arguably changed the course of my life.” Jaclyn and her partner had moved there temporarily while he was earning an advanced degree. It was a challenging time for Jaclyn, but she wouldn’t have done it any other way. She feels lucky to have had the experience she had.
Natural landscapes were not easily accessible to Jaclyn during this time, so she began recreating her favorite landscapes in print. She started with Scarborough Marsh, Kettle Cove, and the rocky coastline of Midcoast Maine. “That allowed me to be in those scenes and take a lot of time in them, especially given the reduction process, printing layer after layer.” It was what she had available to her at the time, and it turned out she loved the process of carving away little by little, working backwards, and in a particular order of color.
Her block for Big Ink is a marsh scene, which is thematic of her work. The landscapes she depicts represent notable memories of time spent outside. She and her partner returned to their home near Scarborough Marsh when he completed his program. Jaclyn spends a lot of time on the Nonesuch and Scarborough rivers at the beach looking at the marsh, on the Eastern Trail, and in the marsh itself where she and her partner go birding often. She studied environmental science in college and was very intrigued by wetlands, “They are tremendously important, tremendously threatened, and I think they are just stunning.” She’s thankful to have the marsh in such close proximity, especially during the pandemic when getting outside felt extra important.
Now that she is back in Maine and lives with these landscapes on a daily basis, her themes are starting to change, “Now I have these beautiful places around me so there’s the desire to keep doing that and capturing those because they are so numerous, but then there is a different body of work that I’m going to be embarking on over the next year.” Jaclyn is currently doing research for a project that will focus on capturing the experience of being diagnosed with a rare disease in her mid-twenties and the impact that followed. She will approach these pieces from the many perspectives she has gained on the topic: as a nurse, as a data analyst, and as a patient. She plans to start developing those pieces and will continue working on the prints when she is in residence at Golden Apple in Downeast Maine next August.
Jaclyn is relatively new to printmaking. She started taking printmaking classes in January 2023. When she first took a reduction print class she didn’t get it. She mapped it out in her notebook and meticulously planned her print step by step. “It was hard to get my brain around, and I think there was a part of me that needed that challenge.” The process requires a lot of patience. Taking it one step at a time, not knowing what the final outcome will be, and trusting her instincts and the process to persist through it has helped Jaclyn cultivate patience. She says the moment when it all comes together makes it worth it.
Making art had been a large part of Jaclyn’s identity as a young person, particularly in high school. She loved drawing and painting and would use visual arts to memorialize special moments with friends and family. When she went on to college and focused on the sciences, she neglected her creative pursuits. It wasn’t until a couple of decades later that she realized that art had never lost its value to her, she had just forgotten about it. Printmaking has been a way for Jaclyn to honor the people and places tied to important experiences in her life. One such print is of the two minke whales that showed up next to the boat at her wedding on Casco Bay, a rare sighting on a special occasion. “As soon as I started making art again it came rushing back. There’s no turning this off now.”
Jaclyn has been balancing several interests after recently quitting her remote 9-5 job. She works per diem as a nurse while she does some soul searching around how to allocate her time. “I’m crafting my time and days and life and what I’m doing for money.” Art has more time in her week now and there are more images in her head than Jaclyn can keep up with.
View Jaclyn’s wedding print and other works on her website, HOME | Jaclyn Janis Prints. Contact her via email jaclyn.a.janis@gmail.com or come by the studio.
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