Our featured member for November is
Janet Flinn 
Wildlife Artist and WAS Artist of the Year 2003

A love of nature combined with inherent talent has given us Janet Flinn, the artist who is our featured member this month.

Her grandfather and great-grandfather were talented artists, and Janet says that both her mother and her aunt “took up painting late in life”. Small wonder then that she trained as an art teacher, receiving a Graduate Diploma in Art Education.  When she had to abandon teaching for health reasons, she was able to devote herself full time to her career as an artist.

I can do no better than to let Janet herself take up the tale of her fascination with wildlife art:

“While I was training as an art teacher, I was fortunate in being able to explore many techniques and learn about the wide and deep history of art. So over the years I have dallied in many areas both 2-D and 3-D and enjoyed them all. Just as many subjects have been explored, but none have held me entranced for so long as wildlife. When one thinks about it, Wildlife Art is the oldest art of all. Wildlife art also has the benefit that it led me to the Wildlife Art Society of Australasia, through which I have met so many, very pleasant, like-minded people.

I can remember painting birds when I was at school, but as an adult I first started to use birds as painting subjects through seeing birds that were attracted to our native garden.”

Janet’s home is in a leafy suburb close to a 129-hectare park which incorporates a lake and wetlands bird sanctuary. The park teems with bird life: they like to pop over for a visit to the indigenous shrubs and trees in Janet’s garden, and she has no shortage of “sitters”.

She also travels a great deal, covering hundreds of kilometres every year to study the birds native to other parts of the country:

Janet is not hidebound in her choice of medium: she chooses her medium in keeping with her subject, and often uses different media in the same work:

“ … I like to experiment a bit, to keep fresh and individual. As I am dealing with a real subject, I strive to combine the tradition of realism with a contemporary abstraction.

I try to be sensitive to the subject and allow it to suggest my choice of medium and approach. So to me a Sea-eagle has to be painted in a ‘strong’ medium, oil paint or pastel, whereas a delicate wren would see me reaching for watercolour.

But most of all, I like to mix the media as the work I admire most of all has an element of multi-layering. I find it most interesting to use the contrast of the opaque quality of pastels or gouache against transparent watercolour, to contrast solid shapes with fine lines and detailed rendering against loose and spontaneous brushwork."

Janet has won international renown: her work hangs in many countries, including America, Japan, England, The Netherlands and New Zealand. It  has been published in magazines, as cards, on calendars, as a wine label and as limited edition prints in Australia and Europe.

She is very pleased that publications and exhibitions sometimes raise funds to aid the creatures that inspire her art:

“ … the great thing about being in the Birds Australia Barren Grounds Art Exhibition was that it raised funds for an observatory.

The award that exited me more than any other, was the ‘Artistcare’ Best Oil Painting Award in 2000 at the Wildlife Art Society of Australasia’s Annual Exhibition.”

An exciting event in her career was the release in 2001 of Feather and Brush: Three Centuries of Australian Bird Art, by Dr Penny Olsen. This book is an illustrated history of bird art in Australia and features a selection of Janet’s work along with thirty-three other present-day Australian artists.

Click HERE to see a page from the book

She has had eleven solo exhibitons and been in numerous group exhibitions. The list of awards she has won is as long as your arm, and this year she was doubly the Waverley Art Society’s “Artist of the Year”:  both Members’ and People’s Choice.

Despite the artistic side of her make-up, Janet is also no slouch when it comes to technological matters: she has designed and maintains her own website, which is well worth a visit at www.users.bigpond.com/jpflinn

A mini-gallery of Janet's work,
illustrating the wide variety of her subjects and media.

All of Janet Flinn's work is copyright and must not be
reproduced in any form without the consent of the artist ©

Scroll by clicking the arrow at each end of the row of thumbnails:
click on the picture you want to zoom

Forest Kingfisher

Magpie

"Lily pond magic"

"Ocean Great"

Melbourne Docklands

Boobook owl

"Side by Side" (Hooded Parrots)

"Tell me more"

"Sugarglider"

Magpies in an Australian summer landscape

Carol Boothman with her portrait by Janet Flinn

Gouache and metallic polymer paint

Pastel

(Major Mitchell's Cockatoos)

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