Ken Januski is an artist and programmer living in Philadelphia, PA, USA. He has studied art at City College of San Francisco, University of California at Berkeley and Cornell University. He received M.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the latter.
His current work is naturalistic, and most work of the last two years is based on birds that he has observed.
Throughout his artistic career his interests have gone back and forth between a somewhat humble rendering of what he sees,
where the subject is the boss of the art more or less, and abstract/non-objective art, where artistic
expression and stylistic bravado may take higher precedence. This has never seemed contradictory to him.
When he was a student in California in the late 1970s artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, and Elmer Bischoff
with whom he studied at Berkeley, seemed to be good examples of artists who made both types of art.
Their work did not include much if any naturalistic art but it did include both abstract and representational work. This was enough to be a good example.
Previous to his bird art he spent a number of years doing small, pen and ink drawings of insects that he found.
This work may seem far removed from his large abstract paintings and from the expressionistic freedom of abstract art.
Ken is not entirely clear why he devoted so much time and effort to them. In retrospect part of it was
probably a quiet rebellion against the art world of the time, one in which it seemed that only art that
obfuscated itself behind a lot of verbiage seemed to be get much attention in the art world.
Simple sketches of real insects seem much more honest in comparison. More practically he also moved from his
large studio to a house with a much smaller studio area. Small sketches were more practical than large paintings.
The drawings allow less artistic expression than any of his other works in the interest of getting down on paper
the fascinating detail of the insects that he saw. Ken considers art to be an investigation to a certain
extent. Pen, pencil, paint or whatever allow him to investigate something. Art is partially a type of curiousness.
At one time the investigation might be about the exhuberance of color and paint; at another it may be about the detailed appearance of an insect viewed
under a microscope.
Though most recent work is naturalistic the majority of work that Ken has done during his career is abstract.
It has both incorporated nature and done its best to exclude nature at various times.
Artists such as Stuart Davis, Mondrian, Kandinsky, whose work often showed little concern
with rendering the world realistically, had a large influence, both in their avoidance of representation and in
the exhuberance of their expression. Davis and Mondrian in particular exemplified artists who thought that art
could just as well portray the excitement of music, particularly jazz, as it could an accurate representation of the seen world.
There is obviously a dichotomy in both working from nature and deliberately avoiding it. In Ken's view neither is
better than the other. Both are valuable and rewarding. At present his interest is in the representational but there is
no guarantee that it will stay that way. Most likely his representational art will take on more expressiveness.
It's also true that there seems to be less and less value placed on the natural world. Since Ken considers
it so important to himself and also to future generations it's most likely that it will continue to be
his dominant subject matter.
Most works are for sale. Selected small works are available at his online store. For all other work please address all inquiries to the artist at Ken Januski. Please choose the links in left column to see more examples of Ken's work. Sketches as well as his thoughts on birding, nature and drawing can be found at Ken's blog.