Originally from Montreal, Janice received an Honours degree in Visual Arts from the University of Ottawa in 1979, specializing in painting and printmaking. Soon after, she discovered the luminous beauty and perfect surface qualities of glass as a medium to create hanging panels, developing a technique of layering the glass into compositions resembling paintings.
In recent years, painting has again become dominant in her studio practice. Working with acrylic and an ink transfer process, her paintings are narrative in content and fauvist in style, characterized by the blurring of interior/exterior spaces and perspectives. They allude to domesticity, relationships and the figure in nature. Couples often appear in loving poses or caught in a spat, as in 2020’s I Want to Watch TV. Single figures may be in yoga poses or mid-thought, pensively situated in an idyllic or ominous environment.
Janice applies paint to wood panels in a variety of ways: by brush, trowel, pressing, scraping and scratching. Blocks of colour set the mood, layered with patterns under images of floating staircases, furniture, trees and clouds. There’s a sense of familiarity in her pictures: the idea of home, of an inner life, and sometimes the uncomfortable truths that can come with that… all contrasted with shocks of vibrant colour.
For 30+ years Janice Moorhead has lived and maintained her studio practice near Wakefield, Quebec in the beautiful Gatineau Hills.
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