Janice CrumJanice Crum is the Branch County Art Guild's Artist of the Month for December 2004. Her favorite subjects are landscapes and flowers, her style is "honest realism" and her favorite media is watercolors. Janice taught school for 35 years and began painting with a friend, also attending work shops and joining art guilds. "About 5 years before I retired, a teacher friend who was also an artist, asked me to go to a summer workshop. We had been going out to paint and I had enjoyed it. We went to Lelanau, MI, to a workshop with Pat Norton. We enjoyed that so much that we went again the next summer. So I began painting more with friends and joined the Richmond Art Club. Other summer workshops were with Janet Walsh, Judy Betts and Jerry Smith. We went to Brown County, Indiana, and to the Art Barn at Valparaiso. Sometimes the Richmond Art Club had one day workshops. After I retired, I joined the Lehigh Acres Art League and the Fort Myers Beach Art Association in Florida. Each winter I took workshops. Jeanne Dobie, Tom Lynch, Tony Van Hasset and Peter Spataro are some of the artists that I studied with. I went to Crede, Colorado, to have a workshop with Stephen Quiller twice and to Whidbey Island to study with Betty Carr. I have learned from them all."
In 2003, Janice Crum's painting was chosen to be raffled off at the summer sale of the Richmond Art Club. She has regularly entered the Fine Arts shows of the Richmond Art Association and the FortMyers Beach Art Association. She won prizes as an amateur and in advanced categories. In 2003, Janice won a prize for watercolor given by the Florida Watercolor Society at the Fort Myers Beach Spring Juried Show.
Some of Janice's goals are to be accepted in bigger shows and to keep improving in her artwork. She enjoys the "group enthusiasm" of the Branch County Art Guild who welcomes Janice as their most recent new member in 2004.
