For decades, Janet Werner has transformed found photographs into fictional women whose identities remain deliberately open. In conversation, she reflects on painting, collage, subjectivity, art history, teaching, and the necessity of simply continuing to work.
The first time I saw Janet’s paintings in person, I found myself doing something I knew I probably shouldn’t: trying to figure out who the women were.
Their faces seemed familiar without belonging to anyone I could identify. Their bodies appeared to have histories, but those histories remained inaccessible. There was always enough information to make me curious and never quite enough to let me settle on an answer.
That tension is central to Janet’s practice. For nearly three decades, the Montréal-based painter has worked with the fictional portrait, transforming found images—particularly fashion photographs—into composite figures that hover between recognition and invention. Her paintings are beautiful, but their beauty is rarely uncomplicated. Faces can split, bodies can shift, landscapes can appear where they shouldn’t. The works invite the viewer in while quietly refusing to tell us exactly what we are looking at.
Her paintings are beautiful, but their beauty is rarely uncomplicated. Faces can split, bodies can shift, landscapes can appear where they shouldn’t. The works invite the viewer in while quietly refusing to tell us exactly what we are looking at.
Janet began making fictional portraits in 1997. At first, she worked entirely from imagination. After several years, when the figures began to resemble one another too closely, she started looking for a wider range of source material. Her move to Montréal, where she began teaching at Concordia University in 1999, coincided with her turn toward fashion magazines as an archive of readily available images of the human figure.
“I wasn’t interested in portrait in that sense,” Janet explained when I asked what drew her to fashion photography. She did not want to bring real sitters into her studio with their personal histories and the dynamics of a relationship between artist and model. The models in fashion photographs offered something else: a kind of imaginative blankness. “They have a kind of similarity in terms of no distinctive features,” she said. “It’s almost like a doll that you can project onto.”
But Janet’s paintings are not simply reproductions of those photographs. The painting process gives the anonymous figure something the original image does not necessarily possess: the possibility of subjectivity. “I hope, though, that somehow through the painting process, they become invested with an actual subjectivity,” she said. Her aim is for a figure to move from something relatively empty into someone who appears to possess “some sort of psychological or emotional life.”
That transformation happens partly through imperfection. Photography can offer the polished surface of the fashion image; painting introduces the hand. “I like to think like I’m troubling the models,” Janet told me.
“I like to think like I’m troubling the models.”
The phrase captures something essential about her work. The models begin as images of perfection, but Janet interrupts that perfection through drawing, redrawing, layering, misalignment and paint. The handmade quality becomes a form of resistance to the clean surface of the photograph.
This is also why Janet does not necessarily know when a painting is finished. A painting can begin with freshness and immediacy, then become increasingly layered and complicated. Sometimes she allows the work to sit until she knows what needs to happen next. At the same time, she tries not to erase everything that came before.
“The initial drawing or painting is often more expressive than subsequent layers,” she explained. “So I try to keep something from underneath coming through.”
Her painting Peggy made that question of recognition unexpectedly personal. When I visited Janet’s Landscape with Legs exhibition at Anat Ebgi earlier this year, my mother was the one who first noticed the resemblance between me and the painted woman. She took a photograph of me standing in front of the painting, which I later posted on Instagram and which eventually led Janet and me to connect.
It was an apt introduction to Janet’s work: I encountered Peggy first through resemblance, even though the woman in the painting was entirely unknown to me. When I later asked Janet about the painting, she told me that it was completed relatively quickly because she resisted the urge to make it more realistic or more “perfect.”
There was something about its rawness that she wanted to preserve. For Janet, that rawness is not merely formal. It carries an emotional and psychological charge. Her figures can be beautiful and disturbing at once. Sometimes a head is slightly offset from a body; sometimes a vertical division breaks through a face. The figure can seem to collapse into the fold of the image. Janet described a kind of violence in these ruptures—something that is not always deliberately planned, but that she does not necessarily want to eliminate.
The paintings begin with images that are already seductive. Janet wants to “fight” against that seduction without destroying it. “I still want it to be a beautiful thing that people want to look at,” she said. “Seductive. But not so easily digested.”
That resistance is part of what keeps the figures ambiguous. Janet does not want to determine their stories for the viewer. Instead, she wants to provide enough clues to make interpretation possible while leaving enough unanswered that no single narrative becomes definitive. “There is a sense of narrative,” she said, “but the narrative is never determined.” The viewer, in other words, becomes part of the painting.
“I think they do and I think they want to,” Janet said when I asked whether viewers inevitably complete her paintings through their own memories and projections. There is a desire to discover the story, she explained, but the work should offer enough ambiguity that the viewer can play with several possible interpretations.
This openness has become even more pronounced through Janet’s use of collage. In recent work, she has increasingly allowed the breaks in her source images to remain visible rather than concealing them beneath a unified painted surface. Janet begins new paintings by collaging two or more images from her extensive collection of fashion magazines; the resulting misalignments, folds and tears become structural elements in the paintings.
For Janet, collage was transformative. “I just need it,” she said. “I need it as a starting point to break the unity of the original image.” She connected this development to her renewed interest in Picasso, particularly the freedom and wildness of his early collages. Yet she remains aware of her own attachment to fragmentation. Sometimes, she admitted, she wonders whether she should not have “everything broken.”
That uncertainty is important. Janet does not seem interested in arriving at a final theory of her own work. Her practice develops through making, responding, and making again.
Janet does not seem interested in arriving at a final theory of her own work. Her practice develops through making, responding, and making again.
Her recent engagement with landscape is an example. Landscape with Legs brought the figure into landscape more directly than in much of her earlier work. The title itself came from a painting that was not included in the exhibition. Janet liked the absurdity of the phrase—the unexpected combination of legs and landscape—and the humor contained in putting two things together that do not conventionally belong together.
But landscape also offered her something she had been missing.
For years, Janet had worked with figures against relatively plain backgrounds. Landscape introduced a different kind of uncertainty: a sense of place that could be harder to grasp than the figure itself. The figure is familiar to her; landscape opens onto the unknown.
She does not yet feel that she has fully understood where this new direction will take her. “I’ll probably keep pushing to see where that goes,” she said. That impulse—to keep pushing—is perhaps the closest thing Janet offers to a philosophy of artistic practice.
Her relationship with art history is similarly active rather than merely referential. She looks at artists such as Édouard Manet, Jean-Antoine Watteau, Caspar David Friedrich, and Picasso not simply as historical figures, but as painters who can teach her something about the language of painting. She is interested in how they approached form, speed, expression, black, landscape, and the possibilities of the medium.
She also spoke with admiration about contemporary artists including Amy Sillman, Alex Katz, Allen Jones and Michael Williams. What connects these otherwise very different artists for her is not a single style, but a particular freedom of thought and process.
“I never feel like I’ve mastered it,” she said of painting. “It’s always looking to see how they would approach certain things.”
That sense of not having mastered painting may also explain why Janet remains so interested in the medium at a moment when images are increasingly produced digitally and, now, through artificial intelligence. Painting can seem slow beside the endless circulation of digital images. Janet nevertheless believes that slowness may be part of its continued relevance.
Painting carries time within it. Its layers, brushwork, and revisions remain visible. It is handmade, physical, and resistant to being produced instantaneously. There is, she suggested, still an appetite for that.
Perhaps Janet’s long experience as a teacher has something to do with this belief. She began teaching when she was 28 and continued for about three decades, eventually retiring from teaching at Concordia. She told me that she cannot imagine what her life would have been like without teaching.
Teaching required her to articulate things she might otherwise have left intuitive: how a painting is constructed, why something works, how to describe what she was seeing. But it also meant continually looking at other people’s work.
She especially valued criticism coming from students themselves. “You can only have your own point of view on it,” she explained. “It’s always so delightful and useful to hear how someone else reads something.”
That idea of looking beyond one’s own perspective runs throughout Janet’s work. Her paintings ask viewers to interpret, but they also acknowledge that interpretation is necessarily incomplete. The artist herself is continually looking outward—to students, to other painters, to photographs, to art history, to the unexpected possibilities that emerge from her own work.
That idea of looking beyond one’s own perspective runs throughout Janet’s work. Her paintings ask viewers to interpret, but they also acknowledge that interpretation is necessarily incomplete.
When I asked her what she would tell younger artists trying to sustain a creative life, her answer was surprisingly simple. “Just keep working.” The work, she believes, will provide the information necessary to move forward. Make something. Respond to it. Say yes or no. Make something else.
She also emphasized the importance of continuing to look: at other artists, exhibitions, films, and images. And when people talk about finding a community of peers, she offered a broader definition of what a peer can be. An artist from another generation can become part of the conversation, even if you never meet. The important thing is to keep the conversation alive.
“It’s not an easy life,” Janet acknowledged. There is frustration, distraction, and plenty of difficulty. But there is also something she called the “magic” of actually doing the work.
And perhaps that is where her paintings ultimately leave us: not with an answer about who these women are, but with the feeling that something is still happening.
A face looks back.
A body shifts.
A landscape opens.
The image remains unfinished enough for us to enter it.
And then, as Janet would have it, we keep looking.
© Barbara Tupova (09/25/26) — Special for FF2 Media®
LEARN MORE / DO MORE
Learn more about Janet on her website.
Read about Janet ’s painting practice in Sticky Pictures.
Explore Janet’s work at Anat Ebgi.
Explore Janet’s work at Bradley Ertaskiran.
Check out Janet’s Instagram profile.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Featured Photo/Exit Photo: Studio portrait of Janet (in her Montreal studio) is credited to Helena Vallée Dallaire.
Middle Photo: “Barbara with Peggy” is credited to Ariza Tupova. (Photo was taken the day Barbara & her mother went to Anat Ebgi in NYC.) For Janet Werner’s Peggy 2025 (60×48) in the background, photo is credited to Guy L’Heureux.
Bottom Photo: Janet Werner’s Wichita Watteau 2025 Oil on canvas 26×33
Studio Portrait by Helena Vallée Dallaire & Wichita Watteau images were both provided by Janet Werner and used by FF2 Media with her permission. All Rights Reserved by Janet Werner.
The “Barbara with Peggy” photo is authorized for responsible use by FF2 on the condition that users includes link to this page in their credits.
Sept 2026: Janet’s works are currently showcased at Anat Ebgi in New York & Los Angeles, and at Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal.
