Art & Creativity Quote by Barbara Januszkiewicz

“Jazz vision” is a telling phrase because it borrows the authority of sound to explain what a static medium keeps struggling to do: move. Januszkiewicz isn’t name-dropping a genre for cool points; she’s reaching for a grammar that legitimizes improvisation, risk, and elasticity in visual art. When she says she sees her art “in musical term,” the slight grammatical friction actually helps the idea land: this is translation, not metaphor. She’s describing a working method where images behave like chords, not objects.

The subtext is a refusal of the museum expectation that a painting is finished, fixed, and fully knowable at a glance. Jazz, culturally, carries a history of making structure out of spontaneity - rules that exist to be bent in real time. By invoking an “ever-changing musical palette,” she positions color and form as time-based decisions: layering like harmony, abrupt shifts like a solo break, silence like negative space. “Visual expressions” plural matters here; she’s not chasing a single signature look so much as a repertoire, a set of variations that can respond to mood, moment, and material.

Contextually, for an artist born in 1955 - downstream from Abstract Expressionism and alongside postmodern sampling - jazz offers a cleaner narrative than theory: a way to talk about experimentation without sounding doctrinaire. It frames her practice as alive, performed, and responsive, not merely composed. The intent is to make you view the canvas the way you listen: alert to cadence, surprise, and the pleasure of not knowing what comes next.