The Unexpected Path Back to Art | Portland Art Gallery Artist Jaclyn Janis

# RM | 2026-05-02 | Jacqueline Janis Transcript

*Source: (recleaned from stored transcript) | Duration: 37m 28s | Cleaned: 2026-05-02 14:21*

## Summary

Jacqueline Janis is a nurse, health outcomes researcher, and visual artist based in Maine who has recently joined the Portland Art Gallery community. She studied environmental science in undergrad before pursuing nursing and briefly considering midwifery, eventually settling into a nursing career that took her from labor and delivery in Philadelphia to critical care in Maine. Her professional path has evolved to include a master's in public health from the University of Southern Maine, work as a research data analyst, roles in health tech companies, and current work in outcomes research for senior living technology. Host Dr. Lisa Belisle explores how Janis's medical background and lived experience inform her artistic practice.

At age 26, shortly after starting her nursing career, Janis was diagnosed with lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), a rare cystic lung disease affecting approximately 3 to 7 per million women. Her initial diagnosis included a grapefruit-sized kidney tumor (angiomyolipoma) that led to the discovery of lung cysts. She experienced multiple lung collapses, including three in the summer of 2016 following her move to Maine, requiring surgeries and bedside procedures. However, Janis began treatment with a drug approved in 2015 and has remained symptom-free for the past decade. She credits the LAM Foundation, specialized researchers, and early access to evidence-based treatment for transforming what initially seemed like a 10 to 15-year prognosis into a manageable chronic condition with significantly extended life expectancy.

Topics discussed include nursing as a versatile career path, the gap between clinical practice and research evidence, the lived experience of chronic disease diagnosis, the role of rare disease organizations in bridging patients and researchers, returning to studio art after twenty years, reduction printmaking as a meditative practice, Maine landscapes and birding as sources of artistic inspiration, the Steller sea eagle and Scarborough Marsh as subjects of her prints, the parallels between living with uncertainty in illness and in the artistic process, and the importance of wonder and acceptance in response to life's challenges. Listeners can find Jacqueline Janis's work at the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine, and learn more about her artistic practice at upcoming gallery openings and online.

## Title Options

From Nursing to Printmaking: Jacqueline Janis on Art and Healing

Living the Question: Chronic Disease and Artistic Practice

Jacqueline Janis on LAM, Maine Landscapes, and Reduction Prints

How Data Science and Rare Disease Shaped One Artist's Vision

The Nurse Who Found Art: Jacqueline Janis Explains

Birds, Blocks, and Breathing: Jacqueline Janis Creates

What LAM Taught One Artist About Living with Uncertainty

Jacqueline Janis: Healthcare Worker, Patient, and Maine Artist

How Jacqueline Janis Carved Her Way Back to Creativity

Maine Birding to Studio Art: The Jacqueline Janis Story

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. And today it's my great pleasure to introduce you to one of our newest artists, Jacqueline Janis, who creates just a beautiful body of work which is very focused on Maine and her lived experience here in Maine. And I feel like we're catching you just as you're entering into the Portland Art Gallery community. So it's great to have you here today.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

It's really great to be here.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

Thanks for having me. Let's start with actually you not as an artist, which I think is the most interesting thing that I found was you had, and I have this shared background in the medical field and also in research, and also you have a very personal story about your own health. So there's a lot of richness that we can move with. But first, just tell me a little bit about your own medical background.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

I actually studied environmental science for undergrad. I started out in biology, pre-med, and then through a series of just kind of interests and transfer of universities, I ended up in environmental science and very happy with it. At the time I was really interested in maybe doing a master's in public health and like environmental health down the line. So that interest was already there for some time. A few years after undergrad, I went back for nursing and specifically to go into a midwifery program also. And that interest was born out of some experience abroad and being in a maternity clinic and seeing my first birth in this rural maternity clinic in West Africa. And so I looked into sort of the OB GYN route and then the nurse midwifery route. And I said, you know, I feel much more drawn to the nurse midwifery path. And so went back to school for an 18-month bachelor's in nursing. You know, very rigorous, very fast paced, and also, you know, expensive. So I went and stopped after the bachelor's portion to work as a nurse, pay off some debt and get a little bit of experience because I thought that that would be pretty important for being a midwife down the line. And I stopped and I worked as a nurse and I was in a reproductive health clinic in Philadelphia. And I actually just really liked working as a nurse. And I, you know, I honestly didn't know much about nursing before I went to nursing school. I didn't have friends and family growing up that were nurses. You know, it just wasn't a familiar place for me. And so I realized that I really liked it. It was a good lifestyle. And I went on to work in labor and delivery for a number of years. And then we moved. My husband and I moved here to Maine in 2016, at which point it was a little bit of a reset. You know, do I want to do labor and delivery or should I go ahead and do something else? And at that time, I had come to this point where I sort of let the midwifery path go and, you know, there's a lot to that, but I decided to not pursue it and I went into critical care. So came up to Maine, started working in the ICU, medical and surgical adult ICU and really liked it. And after a few years was just kind of itching for a little bit more education, knowledge. And really I was looking for how to really assess research and data in order to put that into practice. And so started with a master's in public health at University of Southern Maine and just had a wonderful time with it. So I was still working as a nurse doing the MPH thing and had wonderful mentors there who I got to pursue really interesting research topics with, including in rural health. And so I ended up leaving the clinical world in 2019, taking a job in health outcomes research. And so I was working as a research data analyst. I had really gotten into the data side of things, so using code for statistical analysis was really a big passion of mine and so took this job. It was a wonderful outlet for that. I got to do a lot of interesting work and participate in a lot of interesting studies. From there I went on to work for a software company, a data science software company that was making the software that I was using, and did that for a few years. And then now I've landed in a really wonderful company that makes technology for senior living communities and I do outcomes research now. I started off on their clinical success team, working with our customers directly and seeing how the communities were doing with using our technology, which is meant for, you know, fall mitigation and information on care consumption of residents. And then I moved into this product analyst role and find myself in a really nicely balanced place where I get to do interesting analysis again and also contribute to this really cool company that has a great mission.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

You've actually had so many interesting, different, I guess, parallel and intersecting paths from what you're talking about. One thing that stays with me, just knowing that I've been in medicine for a while and worked with a lot of different nurses is you specifically call out: I really enjoyed being a nurse, and almost in a surprise sort of way. What was it about being a nurse that you found so enjoyable?

**Jacqueline Janis:**

I think that from TV, maybe, maybe not the ER now, I think the ER does a little bit of a better job, but I think you don't realize, I think the general public doesn't realize how much nurses are doing at the bedside and how you watch these shows, this kind of popular TV or these portrayals of medicine and it's just totally wrong. You know, the things that the docs are doing and getting all the credit for in the shows, really nurses are doing in real life. And so I think that there was so much that was just so hands on. You had such an impact on someone's well being and you know, in labor and delivery, that's often times like one of the best days of someone's life and sometimes it's really not. And in ICU, sometimes it's the worst day of their life. And you get to be in that space and occupy that and try to shape it and keep that person safe. And that was a real privilege. That's a real wonderful place to be. And I think that more people should consider nursing. And it's a field that is also so versatile. I think the fact that my path went in all these different ways and then landed in research and now health technology was because nursing is so malleable, you can form it into all these different paths. And that was a really pleasant surprise. And also, you know, it's like a good lifestyle. It pays well usually, I mean, depending on where you are and, you know, what health system you're working in and kind of what city you're in. But it was, you know, something that could maintain a pretty good lifestyle with three 12-hour shifts in a week and also being able to do other things in your life.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

So I would second what you just said, that we need more great people going into nursing because it's such an incredibly important role within the larger healthcare team. And I can say this, having worked with many very talented, very intelligent nurses who honestly made the team better because they were there. And what I also love about what you're saying is that it does enable you to go in different directions. It kind of gives you permission like, oh, here's health outcomes research and I'd like to pursue this and I have enough background so that I know what I'm getting into. But I'm going to add to it, I'm going to get an MPH, I'm going to get more information on data and code. So jumping over to that, what was it about health outcomes research in particular that drew you in?

**Jacqueline Janis:**

I think it was really looking at how much you do in healthcare. And I think labor and delivery was interesting with this because randomized controlled trials in the labor and delivery setting are tough because randomizing someone into a C-section or not is not really a thing. So I think that in order to understand from a more like epidemiologic, like how do we study this? How do we determine something that's, you know, if an association is some relationship of causation or not? I think that there's just so much interesting consideration in terms of what is evidence based in medicine and how do we get there? What does that actually mean? There is probably a published study to back up many of the things that we do, but does that mean it's actually correct? Does that mean we're getting it right? We're seeing it from the right angle. And so there's just a ton of interesting work there. And what I do today is I'm looking at outcomes among our customer base in this health tech company, which is just a really interesting privileged place to be, which is taking their falls data or their care level data and transforming that into like, hey, is our technology having any kind of impact? And really asking the question based on how we would hypothesize our technology to work. And it's interesting, it's really the basis of how we're evolving medicine. But there's so much that we try to do our best at in understanding what the best course of action is for this particular patient or this disease or this trauma that we see coming in. And you know, it's a very gray area. And we saw this in Covid. You know, we saw this with the general public really struggling to understand do masks work or not. Like, you know, the ability for people to really understand the complexity of when something is effective or not, or how we determine if we say it's working or not. There's just so much gray area. And I think the better we can do at substantiating what we're doing and also being able to communicate that in a really clear way to people who need to understand it. I think there's a real art there to that.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

I absolutely agree with you. And I think that there's a lot of stuff having come from the family medicine background that I have, but also I also have a master's in public health and you know, I've done a lot of research in my life and for me it, it was always, it always has been interesting to stand in the clinical space and be thinking, why are we doing this? And it doesn't seem logically to me that what we're doing is actually having the impact that is either what our patients want, which was always really important. Right. What do our patients actually come into the space for? But even does it make it better? Even if they don't want it, does it do anything? So I think it often has been this, like the academic people over here are doing the research, the clinical people over here are doing the thing. So what you're describing is let's bring those together and let's communicate about it well and let's really go to the end user and try to figure out like what, what do they need that is going to make all of this really important. Right. So you have been an end user of healthcare. I mean, we're talking about the sort of meta view of healthcare from the upper levels, but you've been in the healthcare system yourself as a patient and as someone who's also been in healthcare as a patient. Most of us have. I know that that role reversal is very, has a very deep impact. Talk to me about your experience.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

It does, it really does. Especially the timing of it. I was diagnosed when I was 26 with a rare disease called lymphangioleiomyomatosis or LAM for short. It's a cystic lung disease. Rare as in it only happens in women. It seems estrogen related. And so the prevalence is around maybe 3 to 7 per million women. So, you know, decently rare. And it was, it was really like right after I graduated and took my first nursing job that I had a grapefruit-sized tumor on my kidney, an angiomyolipoma, and you know, went to the ED and then, you know, suddenly you're in the ED waiting room in excruciating pain and you're seeing health care from that angle and it doesn't look great. You know, there's a lot of work to do. And then, you know, eventually that benign tumor which I had embolized revealed that I had these cysts in my lungs. And so when I was going for the CT scan to confirm that, I was like, this is so rare. You know, this is, it's probably not a thing. This is probably not a thing, right? Every time you are sick, you, you know, Google everything and it says you're either fine or you die. And you never expect the latter. I received this diagnosis. The information that was readily available via Google at the time was that the prognosis was 10 to 15 years, which is a rough thing to encounter as a 26-year-old. And so very quickly though, there's an organization called the LAM foundation, and they do wonderful work. They support a lot of research going on for LAM. They also provide a lot of good resources for patients and they also bring these worlds together in a really meaningful way. Like how you were describing of just like bridging the researchers and the clinicians to the patients and their families. And really they are such a wonderful example of exactly that. And so eventually I got much better information via the LAM foundation, which was that the prognosis is really difficult to understand because, you know, what determined that 10 to 15 years was people getting diagnosed much later in life and when their disease had progressed to such a degree. And so I was like, okay, maybe I am going to live past 40, it's going to be fine. But at the time, you really don't know how this is going to manifest. And at that point, I had just the tumor. I hadn't had a lung collapse quite yet, but that did happen within the year. And that's another long story. I was halfway around the world when it happened. So I had my first lung collapse. Yeah, several thousand miles away. And so, so then I went on to have a lung collapse and a subsequent surgery in like late 2012, 2013, and then got over, you know, kind of got past that and was like, okay, I don't know. Still don't know how this disease is going to impact my life, but it seems to not be impacting it on a daily basis. I can breathe fine, I can still run, I can do all these activities. And then my husband and I moved to Maine in 2016, and it was that first summer we had actually just gone camping in Acadia. We came back, wake up Monday morning, I just sit up in bed, and I feel my lung collapse. I knew what it felt like at that point, and I was like, how are we on language on this? I was like, oh, damn it. You know, like, here we go. So. But at that point, we both worked at the hospital where I was going to be going to seek care. And we call up our friends, we say, hey, coming in, my lungs collapsed. FYI, we're going to go to the ED. And so my lung collapsed. I had an incredibly painful bedside procedure to try to adhere the lung to the chest wall. So basically there are a couple methods to do this, but the bedside one was insanely painful. It was not what I had done previously in the OR under anesthesia. And so they do that. I get discharged and then I'm like walking around Crescent Beach. I'm like, trying to jog a little bit, trying to get back to being a little active. And I was like, you know, this doesn't feel right. I'm still out of breath. And so then I go back, get another X-ray and my lung has collapsed again. My right. And then go ahead and do the surgery, the full out thing, in the OR, recover from that. And as I had gotten home and was recovering, my left lung went down. And that ate up the entire summer, the first summer in Maine. And what happened in this time was, you know, I was really having to slow down that summer. I wasn't, you know, bouncing around and enjoying Maine and all of it, you know, all that it has to offer, but I was going to the beach and sitting on the beach and I was, you know, going for walks, and I was able to still kind of be held by these landscapes that surrounded me. And, you know, even if I was doing that at a much different level, you know, of activity, it was still a really wonderful place to try to heal from these, from these really, really awful surgeries. And so, yeah, it was a real pain relief being in these landscapes throughout that summer.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

So having worked with many people who have lung issues of various sorts, not this one. I've never encountered this one in my clinical career of 30 years, which, I mean, obviously it's a rare disease, so it's not likely that a lot of people in clinical medicine would have encountered it.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

Exactly.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

But just the ability to breathe is pretty fundamental. Yes. And not being able to breathe is actually terrifying. I mean, even patients who come to me with asthma, for example, or COPD, I mean, one of the things that we do to help them be able to breathe, when it gets very extreme, as you know, because you were in the ICU, is you give them some sedation, you give them some relaxation so that they can actually calm down because it causes a panic. So as you're telling me these stories of being a young person who is actually losing parts of the organs that are enabling you to breathe. I mean, I don't think that can be understated, just how terrifying that would be, but I don't want to assume anything. I mean, was that the sense that you had?

**Jacqueline Janis:**

It's, yes, yes, it was that summer for sure. And the thing that was the most terrifying was that I didn't know if it would stop happening. And so I had those three lung collapses that summer. There are women with LAM who've had 50 or 60 lung collapses in their lifetimes. And that was terrifying. That was really like, I don't know where this road goes. I don't know what this looks like. I don't know if I'm at what point I end up on baseline oxygen. I don't know at what point I can't do the things I love to do anymore. The wild thing about this rare disease is that okay, there's the having a rare disease, which I think like the prevalence of rare disease is actually not that uncommon. But you know, any particular rare disease is obviously very low likelihood. There's the likelihood of you having a rare disease that has a treatment. And the drug that is approved for this disease of mine was approved in 2015 and I got myself into it in 2016. And so I ended up, you know, because of those lung collapses, getting early treatment for this. And I have not had any issues since 2016 and that is 10 years now, which is wild. And so I think it's interesting like there was this, this terror at the, you know, kind of front loaded terror of the disease, the diagnosis, the, you know, in those next kind of four or five years, what was going on. And then it sort of melded into this background more psychological. You know, the implications of this disease certainly have a lot for. It's estrogen related. Therefore, you know, making a family has big implications for that for me. And so the last 10 years have been more dealing with the repercussions of the other ways that it's changed my life. Even if it's not symptomatic on a day-to-day basis or even in these like sort of, you know, kind of periodic, really dramatic times.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

So this is something that I love about being alive and practicing medicine during this time in particular is that we finally have gotten to a place where a lot of things more common diseases, but also this rare disease you're describing, we actually now have research-backed treatments. So instead of we're just going to save your life, which is good, but as you said, you can save a life and then you can get 10 to 15 years and maybe your life is still foreshortened, but instead you're now living with this. And I think that that's a wonderful thing, that's a great place to be. It's kind of like what happened with HIV, right? Where once it was a death sentence and now it is a disease you live with. And a lot of forms of cancer are like this too. So I love this fact. And also it's so interesting because you are now describing exactly what I think most patients really are interested in talking about, which is, okay, I'm alive and I want to have a fully functioning life. And you're right in the middle of what does that actually mean? Because you're like living the research as it happens.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

Right, right, exactly, exactly. It is so interesting. The research on this disease has come so far in such a short time. Again, much in thanks to the LAM foundation and others who are supporting the research that's going on. All of the LAM docs, all the specialists that I've encountered have been the most wonderful people I've met in medicine. So I think there's this like, okay, I've had this very, you know, at times, like really tumultuous experience as a patient in healthcare. And some of that is because of the system and how it's set up, and then some of that is because of physical pain of the thing that you're presenting for. But there are many elements of this, of living with this rare disease that have caused a net feeling for me, of feeling very lucky. And the luck is the treatment. The luck is the LAM docs, the researchers, everyone who's been working on this and why this is so rare. People who study rare diseases are very special in my book and they have created a body of evidence that has proven that this drug is very effective and that there are people now going on to live into their 80s and well beyond even. And this is something that is not necessarily, again, varies very highly for every individual. But this is not necessarily a, oh, here's your prognosis, and it takes a one-way road this way.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

The other thing that strikes me is that there's a lot more information than there once was to get you to where you were in 2015, to get you to where you are now. But you're still kind of living the question, which is sort of simultaneously one of my favorite topics, living the question, and also having lived a question myself. It's not an easy thing. And I wonder if that's where the art comes in for you, because here you are, you're a highly trained, highly skilled nurse who also does outcomes research. So you've got all the data, you've got all the stuff that tells you the things that are the certainties and yet you are actually living the question of the uncertainties in your own life. And that, I think, seems to me the crux of art is living the uncertainty and just being like, well, here I am. What am I seeing? How do I bring this forward into my world?

**Jacqueline Janis:**

Exactly. I. Yes, that is such a good way to ask that and put that, because the art piece. So I had started off as a young person in Cleveland, growing up, going to Cleveland Museum of Art for art classes and, you know, being really into studio art through high school, you know, went down this scientific path. I didn't do anything creative. I, you know, I dabble in writing a little bit here and there, but I didn't do anything creative for about 20 years and then found myself having moved away from Maine temporarily. My husband was pursuing a doctorate. We went down to the D.C. area from 2021 to 2024. And it was in that time that this all kind of erupted for me, and I was really having a hard time living down there. I had, again, been sort of reliant on these landscapes, the physical environment of Maine, the wonderful people, the community that we built, our house, you know, everything that sort of was a support for me through the question. And living through the question kind of went away when we went down there. And not having those sort of pillars to stand on, I was really struggling, and I was really down a lot of the time. And you'd try to get out of the city or try to go to some green space, and no offense to the D.C. area, sorry, northern Virginia, but it just wasn't my environment. It just wasn't my physical environment that I found very therapeutic. There's a good way to say it. A friend of mine down there was taking a ceramics class at this place called the Art League, and I was like, why the hell wouldn't I take an art class again? Like, that's something I once loved doing. Let me do that. So I started off with basic drawing, figure drawing, portrait drawing. And I found this space that was, you know, away from the screen. I was working for, you know, a technology company remotely at the time. It's always on the screen. It was, you know, it felt like a really intense kind of screen-heavy life. And went. And I got my eyes on people and paper and graphite and charcoal and, you know, and it was just like a very, very good space for me now, you know, it wasn't the marsh. It wasn't like going birding, you know, at the ponds, you know, it was just a short walk from my house. Like it was, okay, let me go ahead and indulge my eyes in something else. And it was terribly therapeutic. And so I just kept taking a class every term through the Art League or Discover Graphics Atelier, which is where I did my first printmaking affiliate kind of experience. And I took my first printmaking class in 2023. And so I've been doing this now for three years. And I pulled my first print. It was this print of a Steller sea eagle. This is something we haven't gotten into yet, but birding is a big part of my life. My husband's been a birder since he was like 8 years old. And he definitely got me into it, being the environmental science person that I was. And so this Steller sea eagle is an eagle that's native to Japan and Russia. It's rare to find here. You know, you get these random vagrants now and again. And this one showed up to Maine in 2021, which is when we were doing our final moving stuff out of the house, putting stuff in the basement, you know, for our friends to rent our house. And we were, like, heading back down to Virginia, and David was like, let's go see this sea eagle. So we go, we spot this rare bird. It's wonderful. That was my first relief print. It was a lino cut. And I pulled this print and I was, oh, damn, I'm going to be doing this for a long time, aren't I? There's something incredibly satisfying in carving this thing and then transferring it and seeing this high contrast black and white image and just the surprise factor that's there when you do that and when you're working on something and you don't know how it's going to turn out. And then you see it. And so there is in the living the question where this has really come sort of where it's met for me is in reduction printmaking. And so I take a wood block, totally uncarved, I ink it, I print it, and then I carve away everything that's going to remain that color. And I do that again and again, letting each layer dry, making sure it's, you know, aligned as best as possible on every layer that you're printing. And the process of this during my time in Virginia was, oh, I get to actually spend time in Maine landscapes again. I get to actually go back there, put my eyes back in the marsh. And the tedious nature of reduction printmaking makes you spend a lot of time there. And so that was my way out, that was my way into the things that were therapeutic for me. And then one of my first reduction prints was of Scarborough Marsh, and I pulled it, and a classmate of mine said, oh, I would buy that. And I was like, really? I was like, well, I don't really know what to do about that. And so Jennifer Dunbar, who was my instructor and has been very much a mentor to me, she kind of helped me figure out, well, how do I price that and how do I. And so that was my first sale, was this Scarborough Marsh print to a classmate in my reduction printmaking class. And then, you know, things kind of followed from there. But the living the question is, you know, has a lot of parallels for me in reduction printmaking. The middle layers of it are very nebulous and unknown. I always think in the middle layers that I've wrecked it this time. I've lost my way. It's going to be terrible. And by the time you are laying down these last layers, which are the darkest, which are, you know, some of the things that are giving you the depth and dimension that you're going after, then it surprises me again, and it brings the full picture together. And I think there's a lot of parallels with life, you know, and just, like, what you can learn from it and living with your choices and, you know, once I carve away my block, I can't get it back. There's no going back and changing it. You have to only go forward with what you've done. And that's been a really good lesson for me.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

There's so much richness in what you're weaving with your words on this. When I think about the commitment that you just described, like, I have to make, I have to do this carving. I have to carve this block, and this is where we're going. And still, and still there's a certainty to that, and there's an uncertainty as to what the outcome is going to be.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

And.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

And I know that people who do art understand that art is a process and that there's a lot of layers. Mostly most of the time you don't show up and you're like, now it's all done. Most of the artists that I talk to, it's there's one thing and then you wait, and then you do the next thing, and then you wait and then you do the next thing. But I think people who don't do art maybe don't understand that there's you commit to something. You don't know what's going to happen on the other side. You don't know how the I don't know, let's say the paint is going to dry. You don't know what it's going to look like next to the other shade of paint. So I love that for you, this is, like, almost meditative in a way, the way that you're describing it and also connecting you back to the other thing, the birds. I mean, some people love birds. I happen to have children who are like, we don't like birds for whatever reason. And I'm like, who doesn't like birds? But I mean, I think birds are such an amazing example of sometimes there are a lot of them and they're not rare at all. And that's kind of beautiful because it's spring and you've got all the different, I don't know, the robins and the cardinals and the trees in Maine. And then sometimes you're going after this one rare bird and you're like, wow, this guy. Like, I don't know if I'll ever see this again. But it's touching back into sort of this wonder that you seem to keep drawing upon. You could be really angry and upset about your life and about LAM and about the way that things did not work out for you, but instead you're left like, there's a bird. I'm going to focus on that and I'm going to bring it into my art, which that also has a lesson. I think.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

It does. It does. And I think that, you know, I the art world and birds is interesting. You know, I think that, like, birds are a little bit ubiquitous in the art world, and I think that they are fantastic in their own right of just being a muse. Having all these insane colors sometimes, you know, just these different shapes, these forms and kind of where like where they situate in their habitat. And there's a lot of interesting stuff to explore visually with birds. And it all started out for me as really like these experiences with my husband birding and these really special moments or places where I have felt just really peaceful, you know, where I have been able to put all these other topics on to the side, and maybe not even to the side, but kind of being in those spaces and experiencing some degree of tranquility and acceptance. And here's the scene, you know, that's happening, and it's while birding and it's these landscapes. For me, it is really like these personal experiences and these memories and these moments that were that were really special where I can, like, really feel the air, you know, what was happening when I saw that bird and just how striking it was or, you know, just what it sounded like. And so, yeah, it's really like a much more of a whole experience behind it. When I am doing these birds, it.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

It seems to me that what you're describing is this significant connection that you feel. And really when I, anytime I talk to somebody and I understand kind of what art means to them and what it brings, what they're bringing into the world, it's the ones who always grab me are always the ones who connect with the things that are the most meaningful. So I know that we're going to be having you back again in the future because you and I talked before and there's another whole thing that's happening right now. But it's, right now, it's just, it's in germination phase, I would say. So we'll talk about that later. That's a teaser for people who are listening to our conversation today. But in the meantime, you already have a body of work. You're already at the Portland Art Gallery and you already go to the Portland Art Gallery openings. So I'm hoping that people who are intrigued by what we've been discussing will actually look you up online, will actually go to the openings, we'll take a chance to, you know, take the time to meet you because I think you bring a lot to the space. It's really been great to have this conversation with you today.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

Thank you. Thank you. It's wonderful to be here and great to speak with you. And yeah, we have so much in common, so much to talk about.

**Dr. Lisa Belisle:**

Yes. To be continued. Yes. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You've been listening to or watching Radio Maine, our video podcast where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit with our lovely group of Maine-connected individuals. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery, and the Portland Art Gallery is actually where you will find the works of Jacqueline Janis, who is one of our newest artists. We're so happy to have her with us and I'm so grateful that I spent time with you today. So thanks again.

**Jacqueline Janis:**

Thank you.