Coming exhibition!

Bernard and Janet Bailly : "Grengspitz" - Musée de Morat/Murten

Summer 2025

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This website has been chosen for the collection of Web Archive Switzerland, Swiss National Library, Bern

Member of Visarte Suisse and Visarte Fribourg. 

See www.visarte-fribourg.ch/fr/membres?id=Bailly-janet

Member of the Guild of Swiss Mountain Painters GSBM

Registered with SIKART

 


 

 

Galleries

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JANET BAILLY - PAINTING AIR


After more than twenty years teaching full time at the Collège St-Michel, Fribourg, Janet Bailly is now retired and at last has more time for outdoor activities in the mountains, fields and woods such as horse riding and walking her dogs: two Scottish deerhounds and an Australian shepherd. More time also to spend painting en plein air, breathing in the unique atmosphere of a landscape and attempting to express this uniqueness on canvas.

A lover of the English landscape paintings of Constable, Gainsborough and Turner, not to mention the discovery of Swiss artists such as Koller, Hodler, Diday and Calame, it has been an inspiration to travel in Brittany, Normandy and the Provence to paint in the footsteps of artists such as Eugène Boudin, Monet, Yves Brayer, Van Gogh and Cézanne. After many years of watercolour painting en plein air by the English coast or in the Swiss Alps, Janet Bailly has, over the past twelve years, developed a passion for working in acrylics. With her husband, the artist Bernard Bailly, she has shown her landscape paintings in exhibitions all over Switzerland.

Painting en plein air enables the artist to confront not a flat, impersonal image imprisoned in a photograph but a living landscape which the artist perceives in an emotional way. Working in the heat and cold, adapting to the rapid changes in light, buffeted by winds or dust, the place is also felt physically and not just intellectually. As Janet Bailly sets up her easel and wedges it with stones, selects her colours and begins a preliminary outline in paint, a slow discovery of the true nature of a landscape takes place and the painting develops almost as a physical process. Encouraged by study of the work of English artists of the last century such as John Aldridge and Stanley Spencer, inspired also by the landscapes of Félix Vallotton and Cuno Amiet, Janet Bailly has started to use more intense colours and deeper contrasts as well as sensuously depicting wild plants or trees in the foreground of her landscape paintings.  Sessions en plein air are then followed by a lot of work in the studio. When is the painting finished? When I feel I could walk in the landscape, she says.

Janet Bailly  believes that no landscape painting is effective if the spectator cannot share the sensation of breathing the air of the place. Perhaps because of her previous work in watercolours, beginning with a transparent sky, she is always conscious that she is also painting air rather than just matter and physical form. Colour should never become a cake which obscures the fact that the landscape is bathed in light and air. The  composition itself can also manipulate reality. Every chalet nestling on the slopes of a mountain need not be represented exactly as in a photograph. Those seeking hyperrealism can get a photograph printed on canvas! The painting should retain the expression and emotion of the painter, with visible brushstrokes and atmosphere which is a memory of the artist's feelings and vision. 

Born in Scarborough, Yorkshire in 1956, Janet Bailly came to Switzerland in 1973 and had three children with her first husband, graphic designer Tony Messerli. She obtained a degree (Lic. Phil.) in English and French at the university of Fribourg as a mature student in 1999, followed by the DMG (DAES II) college teaching diploma in 2001. Janet Bailly is a current member of the Swiss professional artists' association, VISARTE and registered in the official Swiss Archives of Artists, SIKART.  Member of the Guild of Swiss Mountain Painters (Gilde Schweizer Bergmaler), GSBM.

In February 2022 this website was chosen for the permanent collection of the Web Archive Switzerland, Swiss National Library NL, Berne, Switzerland.