Flora: Paintings by Janet Alling

A Lifetime Retrospective Collection of the Paintings of Janet Alling

Featuring her main interest, the process of painting from direct observation of plants in natural light, Alling worked on a large-scale using close observation and magnified forms. Her first one-woman show at 55 Mercer in 1972 was enthusiastically reviewed by Peter Schjeldahl, in the Sunday New York Times, Roberta Smith in Art News, and others who identified Alling as a painter to watch among the generation of realist painters working in large scale perception of reality: Alex Katz, Philip Pearlstein, and Jane Freilicher.

Her watercolor and oil paintings in this collection especially are a development of progression of formal visual ideas, color exploration, and the phenomena of the natural world.