"The sky is my muse. It is no-place and all-places, and as a subject matter, it is my connective portal to nature. Unlike landscape, which references the topography of a specific place, the sky is a numinous entity that draws us toward a preeminent power.” Canadian painter Janna Watson uses abstraction as both an escape from and a return to the real. As the world we know dematerializes into paint strokes, so too does her paint take the stage as its very own character in a multi-act drama of composition. Bundles of color, made up of discrete yet inseparable instances of pigment—what Watson refers to as “moments”—are teeming and poised as though caught mid-multiplication. Sweeps of paint re-direct sharply and fold over themselves; thin, rigid ink lines cut into the pictorial field as rudimentary elements in an increasingly complex system of painterly language. Her images often share a certain aesthetic affinity with some of the modernist works of the early to mid-20th Century, and with a formal movement focused on primal energies. Each Watson painting is an act of active witnessing: one which requests us to quiet our busy minds long enough to listen with our eyes to the gentle whispers it offers as a gift to our overworked retinas. Her glacial slowness and pristine void spaces present a polychrome field of vision, one that reminds us of certain musical compositions. She reminds us all that in the end, all fine paintings are a special sort of frozen music, a unique feat accomplished by her ongoing respect for what has been called the original aura of one of a kind artifacts. Subsequent to graduating with honours from the Ontario College of Art and Design two decades ago, and with over forty exhibitions in her aesthetic archive, Watson is a Toronto-based mid-career artist whose ample success and recognition, both critically (an abundance of high profile coverage by top art media, writers and curators) and commercially (an impressive array of private and corporate collectors amidst an ongoing curve of public exposure) has achieved the acclamation level one might associate more with a senior artist with many years behind their professional practice. In an age of ever accelerating technological innovations, there’s something reassuring, maybe even fetishistic, about such a devotion to the art of physical painting on tangible surfaces we can actually touch. This physical empathy is even more evident in an avid adherence to the classical modernist realm of biomorphic abstraction, and in her devotion to the deeply human element of perceptual mindfulness. Her work has appeared in notable public collections, including TD Bank, CIBC, Telus, the Ritz-Carlton, ONi ONE, the Soho Metropolitan Hotel, and Saks Fifth Avenue. In 2013, she was commissioned to create an impressive, 11-foot painting for the lobby of AURA, Canada’s tallest residential building. Watson’s paintings regularly circulate at international fairs, including Art Toronto, CONTEXT Art Miami, and in Seattle, where they were recently featured by Artsy in its list of “10 Works to Collect at the Seattle Art Fair.” Watson’s work has been covered by publications such as The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, NOW Magazine, and House & Home.