Janie Olsen: Animal Kingdom

Trained as a commercial illustrator, Schack Art Center Artist of the Year Janie Olsen lives in Monroe, Washington. Influenced by the literary and art-historical style known as Magic Realism, her animal portraits of endangered species and others follow from the highly detailed 1970s fad of wildlife art (see Robert Bateman and Tony Angell). Assembling realistic details about various animals, Olsen inserts aspects of fairy tales to stimulate viewers’ fantasies of subjective narrative arising from nature’s inhabitants.