Janet began studying art at the age of two in Japan. Her love of art continued after her family immigrated to Northern Ontario in the early 1960s. After graduating from the University of Toronto with a degree in Music Performance, she returned as an adult student to the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD) to study Fine Art with a specialty in figure drawing and painting. Over the past three decades, she has worked in printmaking, mixed media and painting, in genres from portraiture to printmaking and more recently, the landscapes of Northern Ontario where she grew up. She continues to be experimental in her works, exploring and pushing the media in new and radical ways, often as a commentary to the issue of climate change.

My work explores the relationship between natural world and us, the viewers, or occupiers of this world, using colour, texture and shape. With influences from the Group of Seven, First Nations artists and my own background as a printmaker, I developed a style that reflects not only what the viewer expects to see in these landscapes, but also the hidden influences of people on these views. The use of manmade pigments allows me to introduce human elements to the traditional landscape painting, in the same way that we have introduced human elements to natural landscapes. When I was growing up in Northern Ontario, I took my surroundings for granted as most children do. It was only when I started to return there as an adult that I saw not only the beauty of the land, but also the relationships that different groups of people had to the land ranging from the privileged who claimed the waters for their sport, to the natives who tended the land, to the long reaching effects that we all have on the climate and the land.