JANET GLAZIER
VISUAL ARTIST
One of my earliest memories of childhood was the need to draw; I was endlessly interested in colour and the effects it could achieve. For some reason, however, I did not ‘click’ with the way art was taught at school and I was channelled into academic subjects. There followed a lifetime of universities, teaching and lecturing. Art was a constant, but unfulfilling, hobby.
It was not until retirement that I was able to explore what had been nagging at me all my life. At university I now discovered a world of possibilities that I had not known about properly, a world of ideas, of rules and rules that could be broken, of materials, of media, of artists I admired and those whom I could not understand. A hobby that had been almost stiflingly unproductive increasingly became a necessity.
Influences flooded in: Cezanne, Matisse, Macke, Hodgkin, Hockney, all artists who celebrate colour with vigour. Ideas about photography lead to conceptual practice at one point. I learned about the built environment and it inspired photographic work. A lifetime’s lack of real practice crammed into a few years was hard work and there were interesting, but wrong, turns.
I was helped in the process by forming TAKE 13 with a friend. This is a group of women artists who support and stimulate each other in their practice and show their work together.
Now that my work is maturing I can begin to reconcile opposing elements in my practice. I see that representation and abstraction are not the two opposite elements I had thought. After years of believing that they were poles apart I have realised that they can sit easily together in one’s work.