Janas is a visual artist based at McRae Studios in Orlando, Florida. She joined the studio

in November 2020 after relocating from Santa Cruz, California. Janas holds an MA in

painting from Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, which she received in the late 80s.

Throughout her life, Janas has pursued her art practice in diverse ways, including

teaching children and adults, building sets for community theaters, creating festival

parade floats, renovating houses, and creating decorative furniture. She has also shown

her paintings in various venues across the country. Janas' art practice can be diverse, she

usually works with oil paint or “Drawing with Scissors ®” using paper as her medium

and scissors as her only drawing tool.

Janas finds inspiration for her art in the colors, light, people, creatures, and machinery of

the farm she grew up on in Central Indiana. As a little girl, she had a vivid imagination

and would create narratives for each of the farm animals. Her family raised and trained

prized hunting dogs, and she had a special love for the family pig Henrietta. Janas takes

the sweetness of those fond memories and blends them with her current existence,

bringing her two worlds playfully together through expressive brushstrokes and vivid

color. Janas and her brothers now own the farm they grew up on.

In addition to her farm-inspired paintings, Janas enjoys creating portraits. She enjoys

conversing with her subjects and bringing out something hidden in them. Janas has

been in many juried shows over the past 30 years and has been collected by private

collectors in many states, including Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, North Carolina,

South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oregon, Washington, California, Minnesota,

Arizona, Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. She has won awards for her work and

was an Eli Lilly Foundation Creative Renewal Fellow in 2005.