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

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, Jaclyn Janis, who creates a beautiful body of work which is very focused on Maine and her lived experience here in Maine. 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.

Jaclyn Janis:

It's really great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle:

Let's start with you not as an artist, which I think is the most interesting thing that I found. You have, and I have, this shared background in the medical field and also in research, and 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.

Jaclyn Janis:

I actually studied environmental science for undergrad. I started out in biology, pre-med, and then through a series 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 environmental health down the line. So that interest was already there for some time. A few years after undergrad, I went back for nursing, specifically to go into a midwifery program. 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. So I looked into the OB GYN route and then the nurse midwifery route. And I said, I feel much more drawn to the nurse midwifery path. So I went back to school for an 18-month bachelor's in nursing. Very rigorous, very fast paced, and also expensive. So I 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 would be pretty important for being a midwife down the line. I worked as a nurse in a reproductive health clinic in Philadelphia. And I just really liked working as a nurse. 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. It just wasn't a familiar place for me. 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 my husband and I moved here to Maine in 2016, at which point it was a little bit of a reset. Do I want to do labor and delivery or should I do something else? At that time, I had come to this point where I let the midwifery path go, and there's a lot to that, but I decided to not pursue it and I went into critical care. So I came up to Maine, started working in the ICU, medical and surgical adult ICU, and really liked it. After a few years I was kind of itching for a little bit more education, knowledge. Really I was looking for how to assess research and data in order to put that into practice. So I started with a master's in public health at University of Southern Maine and just had a wonderful time with it. I was still working as a nurse doing the MPH, and had wonderful mentors there who I got to pursue really interesting research topics with, including in rural health. So I ended up leaving the clinical world in 2019, taking a job in health outcomes research. 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 a big passion of mine. 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 data science software company that was making the software that I was using, and did that for a few years. And 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 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.

Lisa Belisle:

You've had so many interesting, different, 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, almost in a surprise sort of way. What was it about being a nurse that you found so enjoyable?

Jaclyn Janis:

I think that from TV, maybe not the ER now, I think the ER does a little bit of a better job, but I think the general public doesn't realize how much nurses are doing at the bedside. You watch these shows, this popular TV, these portrayals of medicine, and it's just totally wrong. The things that the docs are doing and getting all the credit for in the shows, really nurses are doing in real life. So there was so much that was just so hands on. You had such an impact on someone's well being. In labor and delivery, that's oftentimes one of the best days of someone's life, and sometimes it's really not. In the 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. That was a real privilege. That's a real wonderful place to be. I think that more people should consider nursing. It's a field that is also so versatile. 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. That was a really pleasant surprise. And also it's a good lifestyle. It pays well usually, depending on where you are and what health system you're working in and what city you're in. But it was 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.

Lisa Belisle:

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. 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?

Jaclyn Janis:

I think it was really looking at how much you do in healthcare. Labor and delivery was interesting with this, because randomized controlled trials in the labor and delivery setting are tough. Randomizing someone into a C-section or not is not really a thing. So in order to understand from a more epidemiologic angle, how do we study this? How do we determine if an association is some relationship of causation or not? 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? So there's a ton of interesting work there. What I do today is I'm looking at outcomes among our customer base in this health tech company, which is a really interesting, privileged place to be. Taking their falls data or their care level data and transforming that into, hey, is our technology having any kind of impact? Really asking the question based on how we would hypothesize our technology to work. It's the basis of how we're evolving medicine. 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 it's a very gray area. We saw this in Covid. We saw the general public really struggling to understand, do masks work or not? 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, there's a real art to that.

Lisa Belisle:

I absolutely agree with you. I think there's a lot of stuff, having come from the family medicine background that I have, but I also have a master's in public health, and I've done a lot of research in my life. For me it always has been interesting to stand in the clinical space and be thinking, why are we doing this? 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. 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 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 go to the end user and try to figure out what do they need that is going to make all of this really important. So you have been an end user of healthcare. We're talking about the meta view of healthcare from the upper levels, but you've been in the healthcare system yourself as a patient. Most of us have. I know that role reversal has a very deep impact. Talk to me about your experience.

Jaclyn 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. The prevalence is around maybe 3 to 7 per million women. So decently rare. It was really right after I graduated and took my first nursing job that I had a grapefruit-sized tumor on my kidney, an angiomyolipoma, and went to the ED. 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. There's a lot of work to do. And then eventually that benign tumor, which I had embolized, revealed that I had these cysts in my lungs. So when I was going for the CT scan to confirm that, I was like, this is so rare. This is probably not a thing, right? Every time you are sick, you 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. But very quickly, 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 bring these worlds together in a really meaningful way, like how you were describing, bridging the researchers and the clinicians to the patients and their families. They are such a wonderful example of exactly that. So eventually I got much better information via the LAM Foundation, which was that the prognosis is really difficult to understand because what determined that 10 to 15 years was people getting diagnosed much later in life, when their disease had progressed to such a degree. 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. 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 several thousand miles away. So then I went on to have a lung collapse and a subsequent surgery in late 2012, 2013, and then got past that and was like, okay, I 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, woke 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, oh, damn it. Here we go. But at that point, we both worked at the hospital where I was going to be going to seek care. We call up our friends, we say, hey, coming in, my lung's collapsed. FYI, we're going to go to the ED. So my lung collapsed. I had an incredibly painful bedside procedure to try to adhere the lung to the chest wall. 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. So they do that. I get discharged and then I'm walking around Crescent Beach, trying to jog a little bit, trying to get back to being a little active. And I was like, this doesn't feel right. I'm still out of breath. So then I go back, get another X-ray, and my right lung has collapsed again. So we 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. What happened in this time was I was really having to slow down that summer. I wasn't bouncing around and enjoying Maine and all that it has to offer, but I was going to the beach and sitting on the beach, going for walks, and I was able to still kind of be held by these landscapes that surrounded me. Even if I was doing that at a much different level of activity, it was still a really wonderful place to try to heal from these really, really awful surgeries. It was a real pain relief being in these landscapes throughout that summer.

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.

Jaclyn Janis:

Exactly.

Lisa Belisle:

But just the ability to breathe is pretty fundamental. And not being able to breathe is actually terrifying. Even patients who come to me with asthma, for example, or COPD, 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 don't think that can be understated, just how terrifying that would be. But I don't want to assume anything. Was that the sense that you had?

Jaclyn Janis:

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. 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 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 having a rare disease, which the prevalence of rare disease is actually not that uncommon, but 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. So I ended up, 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. So there was this front-loaded terror of the disease, the diagnosis, in those next four or five years, what was going on. And then it sort of melded into this background, more psychological. The implications of this disease certainly have a lot. It's estrogen related. Therefore, making a family has big implications for me. 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 periodic, really dramatic times.

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. I think 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 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 living the research as it happens.

Jaclyn Janis:

Right, 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've had this very, at times, really tumultuous experience as a patient in healthcare. 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 living with this rare disease that have caused a net feeling for me of feeling very lucky. 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. This is something that, 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.

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?

Jaclyn Janis:

Exactly. Yes, that is such a good way to ask that and put that, because the art piece, I had started off as a young person in Cleveland, growing up, going to Cleveland Museum of Art for art classes and being really into studio art through high school. Then I went down this scientific path. I didn't do anything creative. I dabble in writing a little bit here and there, but I didn't do anything creative for about 20 years. And then I 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. 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 been reliant on these landscapes, the physical environment of Maine, the wonderful people, the community that we built, our house, everything that was a support for me through the question. And living through the question kind of went away when we went down there. Not having those pillars to stand on, I was really struggling, and I was really down a lot of the time. 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 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? 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 away from the screen. I was working for a technology company remotely at the time. It's always on the screen. It felt like a really intense, screen-heavy life. And I got my eyes on people and paper and graphite and charcoal, and it was just a very, very good space for me. It wasn't the marsh. It wasn't like going birding at the ponds. It was just a short walk from my house. It was, okay, let me go ahead and indulge my eyes in something else. And it was terribly therapeutic. 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 experience. I took my first printmaking class in 2023. So I've been doing this now for three years. And I pulled my first print. It was this print of a Steller's 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. He definitely got me into it, being the environmental science person that I was. This Steller's sea eagle is an eagle that's native to Japan and Russia. It's rare to find here. 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 for our friends to rent our house. And we were 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 linocut. 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, when you're working on something and you don't know how it's going to turn out. And then you see it. So where living the question has really met for me is in reduction printmaking. 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 aligned as best as possible on every layer that you're printing. 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. So that was my way out, that was my way into the things that were therapeutic for me. 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? Well, I don't really know what to do about that. 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? So that was my first sale, this Scarborough Marsh print to a classmate in my reduction printmaking class. And then things kind of followed from there. But the living the question 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 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. I think there's a lot of parallels with life, and just what you can learn from it and living with your choices. 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.

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 do this carving. I have to carve this block, and this is where we're going. And still there's a certainty to that, and there's an uncertainty as to what the outcome is going to be. And I know that people who do art understand that art is a process and that there's a lot of layers. 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 you commit to something. You don't know what's going to happen on the other side. You don't know how 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 almost meditative in a way, the way that you're describing it, and also connecting you back to the other thing, the birds. 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 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 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, I don't know if I'll ever see this again. But it's touching back into 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.

Jaclyn Janis:

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

Lisa Belisle:

It seems to me that what you're describing is this significant connection that you feel. And really, anytime I talk to somebody and I understand what art means to them and what they're bringing into the world, the ones who always grab me are 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 right now, it's just 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 go to the openings, will 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.

Jaclyn Janis:

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.

Lisa Belisle:

Yes. To be continued. 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 Jaclyn 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.

Jaclyn Janis:

Thank you.