Janet Alling

"A distinctive play with the relation of figure to ground pervades most of Alling's work, in both her large, mature oils of the 1980s, such as Grouping, Storm Approaching, Autumn, and Apocalypse, and her seemingly lighthearted and incidental watercolors. She often employs elements of portraiture that radically disconnect the figure from its setting to better reveal its character.... This effect automatically indicates a deep space beyond the surface and, as a result, a fictional world... In many of her flower paintings, the point where the stem meets the ground is never shown... Yet, clearly, these flowers are rooted somewhere; they are presented as real and vibrantly alive.  

This kind of paradox is especially true of her begonias, whose implausible patterns are rendered as entirely natural. It's tempting to say she employs the conventions of Surrealism to this end. But while the Surrealists depicted impossible objects in real space, Alling renders the strangeness of real nature in a dream space. The radical disjunctions between figure and ground in her paintings defies laws of perspective, but this space contains no impossible objects. On the contrary, the weirdnesss in nature emerges all the more forcefully by her placement of totally believable flowers in unbelievable space. Through art, Alling undertakes the difficult task of showing that reality is stranger than art–and she suceeds."

-Bob Stone, excerpt from "Janet Alling's Passionate Eye," American Artist, October 1994 p. 30-34, 73-74

There is a short story by O. Henry, "The Last Leaf," about a woman dying of pneumonia. From her window, she watched a vine growing on the neighbor's wall; slowly, the leaves dropped, and she thought she would die when the last leaf fell. Her neighbor, a young woman artist, knew this. One night, before the last leaf let go, she discreetly went to the wall and painted a leaf on the vine, the last leaf.

In 1955, my mother, who had terminal breast cancer, took me to see the film based on that story. She believed in me. She knew I was an artist and, in this way, was guiding me on my life's journey. 

And so, Destiny, Fate, Serendipity, Chance, Coincidence, Luck, Magic, Instinct, and Impulse enter one's life as do people. My understanding of this happened at a late age. ...Looking back, there is a pattern, a lifetime's journey through floral paintings in many settings. Now, an octogenarian, I've come full circle. I am painting watercolors of patterned leaves.