DAS Member Interview - Janetta Mellet
March 16th 2023 - with Sinead Lawless
Janetta, how did you become interested in painting?
Well I was always interested in painting but life wasn’t interested in me doing painting so I couldn’t do it for years and years, so, when I retired from work I actually started painting. I remember skipping down the hall and thinking ‘wow I’m free now to do what I want to do’ so that is when a friend said come over I’ll give you a canvas and lent me some paints and that is how I started.
What did you do for your job before you were a painter?
Sold books.
What inspires you to paint?
People really. I always have to look at peoples’ faces so now I’m getting that portraiture interests me greatly because you have something that’s alive and that’s readily available.
I don’t like landscape at all. I don’t know how much that is coming from there being so many good landscape painters but it’s all those greens. I find it’s overdone. I’m not attracted to it.
What about putting a person in a landscape, would that change things?
Yes it would, or an animal.
What materials do you use?
Mainly oils but some pastel. I love pastel. I love that chalkiness and the vibrancy of the colours. But I’ve found it a bit of a pain you know, they all end up under sheets of tissue paper in books somewhere.
I saw a pastel by LeBrun which was 300 years old and still perfect so it’s a question of doing it the right way I suppose.
What does a perfect painting day look like for you?
Not being interrupted mainly and my life is interrupted quite a lot by telephone calls and things. Having the time to be completely absorbed in it and I find interruptions throw me. It’s hard to get back into the same mindset.
Any stand-out memories with the Dublin Art Society?
We had the American artist, Susan Carlin, come over and stay and we brought her to the west to show her our countryside and she was inspirational actually. She was enchanted with it. I’d love to see us being able to do things like that again.
What would your daily rituals be before painting?
I don’t really have a ritual. I paint with a group and if I didn’t do that I might go weeks without painting so that would be my discipline to go. I need to have a work-in-progress for that. I don’t have a ritual, I’d get up and God knows what way the day would go. I’d either paint or I wouldn’t paint but I very seldom say ‘today I’m going to paint’ which is crazy, I mean, most people are much more organised on that.
It’s very important to me to be with other people who are doing the same thing as I am doing. I never went to university and I love that interchange with other people.
Would you say your family is creative?
I come from farming stock. My direct children are very creative. My son is a sculptor. My mother’s family are all from Dublin. They were and are very creative.
I think you have a great advantage if you were brought up in the country because as a child you become very observant. Everything around you absorbs you. I remember there was a certain clump of daffodils in a field that I almost worshiped because they were narcissus and everything else was just ordinary daffodils. Things like that for a country childhood. It’s very rich.
I would be very aware of things around me.
If I watch a film or something I have to go and look it up afterwards and see the real person. I’m reading about Hugh O Flaherty at the moment who was the Irish priest in the Vatican during the war who smuggled out a lot of refugees, prisoners of the third reich and I had to go and look him up to see his face, his real face and I find that sort of thing fascinating. I would read people by their faces a lot, rightly or wrongly probably.
I think at my age I would like to branch out into more abstract work and I just don’t seem to be able to get there. It drives me absolutely mad. You know I’d love to be splashing colours around and being more adventurous and I seem to go back into the same old mode.
Have you considered changing the medium for that?
Well watercolours I don’t like. You know my father always said you should learn to ride on a horse and graduate to a pony because ponies are such little buggers to ride and I feel that that is the same with oils and watercolours. You should learn to paint in oils and graduate to watercolours because watercolour is tricky. Don’t you think that?
I don’t know if you have watched that marvelous programme that’s on BBC4 with Andrew Graham-Dixon, he was covering French art right up to Picasso which of course wasn’t French but marvelous marvelous man talking about painting but it makes you think of the fashions in painting and I feel the fashion now in watercolour is smudge you know. I sometimes look at a painting and think oh my god they just did an ordinary painting and then they poured water over it.
I like the finished result very often but then I think this is a gimmick, it’s a fashion, it’s a method.
When you think about design I love Rene Macintosh for instance, his designs in furniture and his drawings and everything and they’re very precise. I’d rather achieve what I want to do in oils. I just love oils and pastel and I don’t at this stage want to venture into watercolour.
How has the pandemic affected you?
I wanted all my life to paint, but I couldn’t. My life was too complicated to paint. That is the wonder of when you’re retired.
But everything has been closed down for 5 months for me. First it was covid, then J had a massive operation and then I had this operation so everything has been closed down badly and you’d say sure I have all the time in the world now, I’m here but you’re wanting to be creative has been squashed and I don’t understand why that happens.
I often wonder about our senses and whether modern living has closed down a lot of our senses and what is the relationship between painting and smell. I would find smell very important and for instance the pine trees in the south of France, the rocks, the sea. All those three things put together make a huge impact on your senses so if you were painting there it would have to come into your painting.
There’s a marvelous painting centre up in the North of Ireland and there’s an American artist called Rob Liberace , he’s fantastic and we did a workshop up there . You can stay in the place and its marvelous they've all these cottages and places that you go and then they get a visiting artist. I must look into that again because that was marvelous.
