Janet Mitchell (artist)


Janet Mitchell was a Canadian modernist painter from Alberta,
known for her fantasies of Calgary in watercolours and oils.

Life

Mitchell was born in Medicine Hat, Alberta, in 1912 and as a young child, adopted by a Calgary couple. She worked as a chambermaid at the Palliser Hotel, and took evening classes at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art, and in 1942 attended the Banff School of Fine Arts on a scholarship. She was mainly self-taught but in 1959, she studied at a summer workshop with artist Gordon Smith. Before taking up painting full time, she worked at Calgary's federal income tax office, 1940-1962.

Career

She first exhibited her work in 1947, then in 1948 showed her work in the Calgary Group exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, considered to be one of the first modernist painting exhibitions of Alberta artists. Her first one-person show was held in Toronto in 1949. Numerous one-person exhibitions followed, mostly in Alberta, at the Allied Arts Centre in Calgary, Alberta, and in Toronto, and many other galleries across Canada.
Mitchell was influenced by Paul Klee and Marc Chagall whose work she saw on a trip in 1950 to New York. In Canadian art, she was influenced by David Milne.
Her work is in the following public collections:
Her papers are in the Glenbow Museum, Janet Mitchell fonds.
On February 26, 1998, Janet Mitchell died of cancer.