Watercolor artist celebrates spring with floral paintings

GRAYSLAKE – Since early childhood, watercolor artist Juli Janovicz always has loved gardens – her grandmother’s vintage garden, her mother’s rock garden, fairy gardens, secret gardens you’d peek at through a fence and half-remembered gardens from her earliest memories. Thumbelina was her favorite fairytale.

All of her garden experiences would influence her art, but it would take some time.

Janovicz earned a bachelor’s degree in English and master’s degree in library and information science. She worked as a librarian throughout the Chicago suburbs, creating a thriving career in library sciences but never let go of her love of the garden.

She became a cottage gardener for more than 25 years and spent much of her free time studying garden design, color theory in the garden, historic gardens and antique flowers. She took courses in the studio art program in Expressive Botanical Arts at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe.

“This time of year, I find myself staring at the ground a lot. I just start waiting for things to come up. I wait for the day I can smell the dirt,” Janovicz said in a news release.

Janovicz’s connection with plants, flowers and soil comes as a sixth sense, and she has used it to explore the poetry of botanic movement and growth.

As an artist and painter, Janovicz emphasizes the tension and movement that flowers demonstrate over time. She shows the physical toll that gravity takes on the life of a flower and how it impacts each bloom, each stem, each leaf and each color.

“The essence of the individual blooms and the nuances of the vase captures my imagination. As I draw and paint, the colors of the flowers and the memory of the garden vibrate in their container,” Janovicz said.

One of Janovicz’s favorite parts of her artistic process is deciding which flowers to draw and paint next. Being surrounded by flowers both at home and in her studio, she is most inspired by their scents and the unique motions and shapes each plant forms over time. She often takes trips to the florist, where she picks out her seeds and flowers and loves the explosion of scents and colors to absorb. Her favorite flowers to paint include roses, carnations, tulips, lilies, peonies and morning glories.

Janovicz has a distinct, one-of-a-kind style of watercolor painting where she leaves part of the pencil drawing unpainted. This symbolizes the past and future movement of the floral arrangement. Her work is highly popular with collectors and has been shown in galleries in Illinois and Wisconsin.

Janovicz is represented by the Blue Moon Gallery in Grayslake, where she presents her work at monthly artist receptions on the fourth Saturday of every month from 6 to 9 p.m. The gallery is located at 18620 Belvidere Road in Grayslake. Her art also can be viewed online at www.thebluemoongallery.com