Anne Lilly and Joel Janowitz share more than just a passion for painting. The married couple currently have their work on display at the ARTI gallery on 70 Washington Street through Sunday, Oct. 15. The couple credits Marblehead artist and ARTI founder Amy Hourihan for making the exhibit possible.
Lilly spent her childhood living in multiple western states including Wyoming, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. She came east for the first time to study engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. She eventually transferred to Virginia Tech to study architecture. After earning her degree, Lilly spent time working for some international architectural firms in Switzerland and England before landing a job in Boston and settling down. She always enjoyed art growing up but her family’s technical background is what led her to study architecture and engineering.
“When I left my education and started working in architectural offices, the practice was just very different than what I loved about studying architecture,” Lilly said. “I started taking evening classes and eventually got a studio.”
Lilly explained that the process of architectural design prepared her for this new path in art.
“Architecture is an abstract language,” Lilly said. “You don’t make buildings that look like bunnies or shoes or whatever. When I started making art, it was natural for me to work abstractly.”
Lilly began as a kinetic interactive sculpture artist. She created interactive artistic mechanisms for a time before transitioning from three dimensions to two as a water color painter.
“It kind of got to a point where the restrictions of this language, being as rational as it was, I was ready to do something more forgiving and more immediate.”
In 2013 Lilly was awarded the grant award for lifetime achievement from the Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation, and in 2019 she received a fellowship in sculpture from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Janowitz followed his passion for painting earlier in life. The New Jersey native credits a high school teacher for igniting his passion for abstract painting.
“When I was in high school I had a teacher who studied with Robert Motherwell,” Janowitz said. “It was a real ‘no-no’ to do abstract painting back then… so he had an after-school club where five of us who were really interested came and made paintings.”
Janowitz received his undergraduate degree from Brandeis University and his masters in fine arts and painting from the University of California. He has spent time teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Wellesley College, Mass College of Art MFA program, Princeton University, and Brown University. In 2013 he was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting.
Janowitz explained the nuanced similarities and differences between his and Anne Lilly’s art styles.
“There’s a similar kind of contemplative factor,” Janowitz explained. “For her, the interest is very explicit in building very quiet, meditative, abstract spaces. In graduate school I moved into kind of a minimal abstraction. I was trying to get a feeling for what happens when we’re not looking at something specific but just looking at the space around us?”
Janowitz added that while his work has evolved into a more readable and representational style, he still focuses on abstract aspects.
“The color and the space feels very connected to her work,” Janowitz said. “We hung our work side by side in the show and I can only say I felt like it enhanced my work to have hers next to it. I think she feels something similar.”