Barbara Januszkiewicz
Barbara Morrison Januszkiewicz is an American painter who is best known for her stylistic independence. However she has associations with both the Washington Color School, conceptual art and avant-garde schools. She specializes in a hybrid style that blurs the line between drawing and painting. "I live with a bit of excitement & adventure each time I start a new work. My style grew out of the influences from Paul Jenkins, Frankenthaler and now the Washington Color School artists but it did not stop there. I have been pushing my work to go farther.
Seeing my brushwork in waves of curving color-shapes submerged in translucent washes, immensely rich with a light source not from applied paint but from the luminosity of the brilliant white paper or canvas. More so I take influences from music and strive to capture that in sound frozen in my work.”
Januszkiewicz trained formally under Chinese master Mun Quan, at Jacksonville University in the late 70’s. Mun Quan’s influences can be seen in her wet and controlled technique. Her experiments in stretching the creative boundaries of watercolor led her to make her own paints for greater depth of color and luminosity. Her work has been shown at the Phillips Collection, the Corcoran, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Mclean Project for the Arts and more. Januszkiewicz befriended artist Paul Reed in 2013 and because of this relationship started working in acrylics on unprimed canvas.
Januszkiewicz is the first resident visual artists with the American Jazz Museum and has worked closely with Matthew Shipp and David Leibman in music with art. Januszkiewicz released The Composer 2014, an avant-garde film with Matthew Shipp. She is currently producing the first documentary about the art scene in DC from the 1960s called The Washington Color Painter, movement.
Januszkiewicz has had her own art studio in Arlington for the last 15 years.
Philosophically, Januszkiewicz values risk-taking, experimentation, and creative collaboration. Her music-infused art is an example of the dialogs she hopes to establish between artists from diverse disciplines — with the overall goal of a more expansive creative vision.
