Sea Changes
Pulter - racing waves on the Clett
Jabble - wind increasing
Sea Changes • Janette Kerr
To simply call the works of Janette Kerr ‘sea paintings’ is not enough. They are responses to landscape and environment, sound, silence and movement: the swell and breaking of waves, the confluence of spray with air, emerging sunlight and advancing rain. Her potent and encompassing oil paintings convey the constant interplay between restless, dynamic forces. Here is the pure, untethered character of nature and its primal energy.
To harness the intangible, elusive edges between place and atmosphere, science and spirit, experience and spontaneity, Janette immerses herself completely in her subject, travelling extensively in the wildest places, focusing on Shetland and the Far North. Whether sailing the coast of Svalbard in the High Arctic, collaborating with Norwegian Oceanographers or living in remote Greenland for months, there is always a sense of the northern romantic tradition – of embracing the sublime. Few contemporary painters achieve this with such clarity and conviction.
A definition of Shetland weather words used in Janette’s paintings:
Blink - gleam or glimmer of light • Sjoljogo - mist lying over the sea • Jagaweet - slight drizzle with fog or haze • Jabble - choppy area of water at sea • Kwikn - increase of the tide • Sokkin - slackening of the tide before it turns • Sjukavi - agitated sea with waves going against the wind
