About

It was the late summer of 1973 when Janet Stapelman, a recent college graduate, stepped off a Greyhound bus from Rochester, New York at the Port Authority in New York City. With two suitcases, one full of art supplies, the other full of clothes and three hundred dollars cash, she was ready to take on the city and make it her own. In just three days she found an apartment at 56 St. Mark's Place in the East Village, bluffed her way into a job as a switchboard operator in the garment center, bought a small drafting table, enrolled at Lester Polakov's Studio and Forum of Stage Design, and began Life Drawing classes at the Art Students' League.

Janet was lucky. After two bumpy years at Catholic University in Washington, DC, years filled with changing majors, tear-gassed peace marches (1969 Moratorium to End the War) and numerous rock concerts, she transferred to the State University of New York in Oswego. At this quiet, frigid campus, she exhausted her credits for Art courses and was seduced into the thriving theater department, where her professors correctly told her she would gain the skills to build a career. She had known since childhood that she would live in New York City and now with these newly acquired technical theater skills, she knew how she would do it.

For six years, Janet studied, worked various jobs and designed sets for small theatrical productions and college theaters. Janet worked for the iconic Broadway designer, Donald Oenslager, from the fall of 1974 until his death in June, 1975. After his passing, she continued working for his widow, Mary "Zorka" Oenslager, closing Oenslager's office at 1501 Broadway and cataloging his collection of theatrical drawings when they returned home from the tour of "Stage Design: Four Centuries of Scenic Invention,"

In 1979, Janet took and passed the painting exam for membership in United Scenic Artists, Local 829. As a member of the union, she worked as a scenic artist, specializing in backdrop painting, primarily for the Broadway theater. Over the next 31 years she painted sets for more 250 shows, including 42nd Street, Beauty and the Beast, Big River, Cats, Evita and Sunday in the Park with George.

Working with her classmate from Polakov's Studio, Joe Forbes, at his shop Scenic Art Studios, Janet co-founded the Studio and Forum of Scenic Arts in 2003, a vocational school for aspiring scenic artists, patterned on Polakov's methods which had served them both so well. Janet was the educational director and scene painting instructor from the school's beginnings in 2003 until 2010. With the belief that anyone who has the desire and the will to work hard can learn to paint, she worked with students to develop drawing skills, accurate color mixing and value matching, and a confident and personal brushstroke. The school continues today in Newburgh, New York.

In 2004, Janet was diagnosed with Rheumatoid Arthritis. Despite the diagnosis, she continued working and teaching until August of 2010, when the effects of the disease made it impossible to meet the physical demands of a scenic artist's work. Although this marked the end of two careers that she loved, Janet felt lucky. In this period of change she decided it was time for another move - a move to the only other place she ever wanted to live - the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In early 2012, she left the New York winters behind and headed south, making the town of Nags Head on Bodie Island her new home, setting up a small, sunny studio where she could create.

Janet had been a needlepoint hobbyist and for years saved the "snippets" and leftover threads from her projects, always thinking that there would be something she could create with them. One day, unable to paint with the comfort and satisfaction she once could, she took those snippets and began gluing them onto a canvas-board, "doodling" with the short, worn, colorful threads. The serendipitous results of the juxtaposing colors and the directional changes of how the threads caught the light were mesmerizing. Soon she was amassing fresh skeins of thread in all different colors, designing larger and more structural images, committing to the meditative process and making it her own.

Janet was born in Washington, DC on March 23, 1951 and married Neil Stapelman in 1981. Together they have two sons, Benjamin and Zachary.