I was born in Cuba and raised there until 1960. When I was 13, my family left on a vacation to Mexico. What was planned as a two-week vacation became a life-changing immigration from Cuba to the United States. We settled in Central Florida, a conservative area. When I was 17, I entered Florida State University in Tallahassee. There, things finally eased for me. However, because boundaries were not respected by either the lesbian or the straight male environment, I found it difficult to express my true nature.
I received a bachelor of science degree in criminology at FSU and decided to come to
California in 1969. I followed up by enrolling at U C Berkeley, in Berkeley, California in 1970.
After receiving my teaching credential in elementary education from U C Berkeley, I worked for 29 years in Spanish bilingual and 7 more years as a substitute. I was particularly good at working with “problematic” children. While teaching middle school, I decided to study psychology. I was accepted at the humanistic Psychology Department of Sonoma State University. The external degree program allowed me to continue at Mission Mental Health in San Francisco as an intern, where I had been volunteering. I was supervised by Patti McWilliams, a psychiatric nurse, and by my professors and psychologists, Larry Horowitz and Art Warmoth. Their excellent academic program gave me freedom of study and freedom of personal growth. In 1982, I transferred to teaching at a lower grade (second grade) so as to teach newcomers from Latin America and informally make use of my clinical psychology skills. I found that “talking group” meetings with the girls not only resolved many of their issues successfully, but that they became more outspoken. In retrospect, their content reflected a support for the present day “me, too” movement. In 1988, I received my master’s degree in psychology. Besides deepening my teaching skills, my experience with psychology provided a foundation for art.
I am self-taught and my art expresses my inner world, in that I was a person of parts and well- integrated by 2008. At that time, a muse inspired my abstracts, beginning with “To All the Women Who Didn’t Want Me” (a joke). This phase ended with “Orange is the Color of Her Hair”. Then “Mystery of the Avian Dance” came from a dream in which I had been excluded and was the sad, or blue, heron. Birds followed from nature. However, “Beautiful Woman” is both that and an abstract bird that followed representational birds. Later, “25 Years” brought out of my subconscious the vile sexual abuse I had experienced from an uncle as a child. The difference in the color of the eyes gave light to who the person was in this drawing.
From this revelation and freeing experience, I became interested in a childhood love, baseball. In 2014, I became enthused about drawing baseball figures of the SF Giants. My favored one is Hunter Pence! Our encounter was mutually inspiring on the day I gave him the original of a charcoal portrait I had drawn of him as he came back to play from an injury. He hit the winning double on that day, June 24, 2018. Hunter shared his feelings of our success that day at a later meeting. Enhancing my self-esteem, he expressed that I am a kind person. I told him I love him.
I have many people who encourage my artwork and believe in me, but the first one suggested the following description of my baseball art. Together we wrote:
“My way of painting depicts the kinship between the sport of baseball and the aesthetic. I hope that viewing my work brings great delight to the eye and enlivens the senses of the observer.
My intention is to raise a pertinent question whether the beauty of baseball is in fact an art form?
Each composition approaches this question by offering the viewer the opportunity to experience the complexity of the movement and vitality of baseball contained in a single moment of time.
My desire is that the portrayal of the kinship between baseball and art opens your body, mind and heart to the sensuous nature of form, function and flow involved in purposeful play.”
Thank you for reading my story.
Janis