Janice Sugg's painting style incorporates a layering effect. Her method interleaves textures, blending color and a subjective atmosphere within her imagery. She paints using unpredictable palettes—a spectrum of color that often challenges well-worn clichés (the sky is blue, the land is green, etc.). The resulting layers are successively wiped and refined revealing a composite of underlying design—the result of colorful swathes of braided paint unfolding and enfolding the values within her palette. Indeed, her surprising use of color has become a distinctive attribute of her work.
Janice's abstract western landscapes experiment with this concept of horizon—austere western prairie bonded with a shifting sky. So much more than just a thin line, her imagery reveals the horizon's intricate variety in rich layers and unusual color. In her landscape the horizon twists and turns, rolls and flows like a physical entity. It smudges, it bleeds, it splinters, expands and contracts, appears, and is gone. And yet her horizons are restrained by a quiet subtlety that might often go unnoticed. All the consequence of an unaffected invention that results from intuitive strokes on the canvas.