Profile: Janet Goldman Merrill By Writer and Contributor Emily McGinn
Since she was young, Janet Goldman Merrill has felt a special connection with animals. So it was only natural for her to start drawing them as she began to hone her artistic skills.
Her artistic journey began with scribbling on walls in her house. As she grew older, she recalls that her father would purchase her how-to-draw books and would encourage her as she practiced.
“My father used to bring home scrap paper from his work, and I would draw on the paper. As I got older, he would critique my drawings. When ‘101 Dalmatians’ came out, I copied the main characters and I would copy pictures of dogs,” Merrill says. “He started buying me how-to-draw books, and I would diligently go through every page and every exercise, and I learned about how to simplify forms and shapes as you build a drawing.”
From there, she went on to take art classes at El Camino College and Brigham Young University. She recalls receiving her first commission when she was 19 — a friend asked her to sketch a head portrait of his horse for $5.
Since then, she has worked in many mediums, starting with pencil and transitioning to mainly pastel. She has also worked in oil and watercolor, and as cameras improved she dipped her feet into photography as well.
Merrill’s work emphasizes detail in her subjects, such as the ringlets of fur on a dog’s coat. As she works, she begins to see life enter the painting.
“As I'm working on it, the hair and the way it's moving expresses the anatomy and the gesture of the dog. So you end up getting a feeling for the skeleton and the muscles and the tendons and so forth underneath the hair,” she says. “It's just a process of looking and looking and looking and hand-eye coordination. It takes a lot of time, and then — and I cannot explain this to you — all of a sudden there's life coming out of that picture. And I cannot make that happen, but that's where I think the inspiration and the gift starts expressing itself. That's something I can't force or fake. It just happens.”
Merrill prefers to draw from life instead of from photographs because it gives more volume and dimension to the work.
“When you just draw from photographs, your drawings look very flat, and that's because the camera has already flattened the three dimensions that you're looking at,” Merrill says. “There's a different feeling about drawings and paintings from artists who spent a lot of time drawing from life. There's a special quality when you spend the time outside or on the floor next to an animal, or drawing a person who is really there. There's a life and a three-dimensional quality to it, and scientifically, I cannot explain why, but there just is.”
Merrill enjoys connecting with her animal subjects and bringing them to life in her work, but she is frank about the process: it is not easy. She works plenty of hours, and there are many times when she makes mistakes, gets lost or has to start from square one again. When describing her process, she references the phrase, “Success comes from 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration.”
She recalls one instance where she was painting an 8-by-10 portrait of a curly-haired dog and had to struggle through part of the piece to get the detail right.
“There was a whole section that I realized at some point was totally wrong — the position of the hair, the direction. Somehow I had lost my way,” Merrill says. “And there was a moment when I was just scared because I lost my ability to see. I couldn't see what I needed to do next. It's like there was this blank spot inside my head. So I prayed about it, and this little voice said, ‘Look at it from a different angle.’ And so I started that section from another point in the picture, and very, very gradually, everything fell into place, but that was a gut-turning, gut-wrenching moment.”
While it was difficult, that piece stands out to Merrill because of the challenges she faced. When she overcomes obstacles during a piece, she finds it rewarding to reach the finished product.
“I just want things to flow out of me, and sometimes they don't,” she says. “But what I feel good about is that I was able to persist through the emotional exhaustion and finish that piece and the owner was very, very happy with it.”
Right now, Merrill is working on several commissions, and she still sees growth and evolution down the road in her artistic future.
“I want to get looser. I want to work in watercolor for a while and loosen up my pastels and just try different styles,” Merrill says. “I want to expand. That way, I can't do anything [too] detailed. It becomes a little compulsive and tight, so I would like to move away from that, and frankly, just enjoy my art a little bit more and have it be more expressive. That's my goal.”
You can follow along with some of Merrill’s work on her Facebook page.
Bio:
Emily McGinn is a journalist based in the Los Angeles area. She enjoys reporting on and writing about a variety of topics from lifestyle to news, especially in her areas of specialty, environmental science and political science.
