Women in Business Profile: Artist Janet MacKay

Mar 06, 2024

No one can say how many businesses there are in the spread out communities that make up this region. But in houses along main streets, hidden along the back roads or around the many lakes, there are a diverse set of enterprises serving customers around the corner, or around the world thanks to increasingly available Internet services.

While the roads are full of vehicles on week days, travelling to work centres - Kingston, Perth, Napanee, and Ottawa, there are just as many people whose commit is a stroll to their home office, workshop, or studio each day.

Sometimes there are signs at the road advertising the business, but more often the businesses are more discreet, and that is the way a lot of people like it.

When it comes to celebrating women in business, as we do each year as part of International Women's week, not only are there many retail and service women run businesses that everybody knows about in the hamlets, there are also hundreds that do not immediately stand out.

One example of that is the artist, Janet MacKay, who worked for decades in Ottawa, while also enjoying living seasonally at her cottage on Black Lake, the small lake where Sharbot Lake Provincial Park is located.

While life in Ottawa had been good for Janet and her partner, Mitchell, they decided to live year round at the lake, where they both had deep roots with with both the land and family.

They replaced the old cottage that Janet purchased next to her parent’s cottage in 1995 with a new four season home and studio. While it was challenging building during a pandemic, the couple made their permanent move to Black Lake in 2022 and couldn’t be happier with their move.

“We ran Worldview Studio and Gallery in Ottawa for 20 years, and transitioned that to re-establish our art business here,” she said in an interview last week.

While they run their studio/gallery together, and share responsibility for its management, each of them pursues their own art career.

Janet graduated from McMaster with an arts degree in the mid-1970's, and embarked on a career in industrial design and project management with the National Capital Commission (NCC). She began working as a graphic artist for the NCC, which evolved to a role as senior industrial designer, mainly working on outdoor bronze public art and interpretation in the last 15 years of her employment prior to her retirement in 2007.

Since 2007, she has enjoyed focusing on both sculpting and painting. Her vibrant paintings of waterways and rural scenes have often been seen at art shows and in public settings across the region. Janet gets her inspiration from her beautiful lake with all the canoes passing by, as well as from her many paddling adventures both near and far with her partner, Mitchell. Her most sought after paintings are from her “Skinny Dipping in Canada” series - featuring her vibrant canoes draped with clothing. and the dippers are left to the viewers imagination.

“I always have my camera close at hand – as those breathtaking moments have a way of presenting themselves unexpectedly,” she said, in the artist statement on her website. But she is keenly aware of the limitations of photography in nature settings.

“Very few of my photos come close to capturing the experience. Have you ever noticed that your photo of that sunset that took your breath away, just didn’t do it justice? I feel that my job as a painter is to breath the life and spirit of the experience back into that scene that my memory recalls and which the camera could not.”

Her works are mostly oil on canvas, and her distinctive palate is no accident, as she starts with a red canvas, onto which she sketches with black paint, onto which she “layers up colour”.

“Somehow that red breathes life into the painting, and the black under sketch makes the colour vibrate like in a stained glass window,” she said.

Her work can be found at a number of restaurants in the region, and will be at Gather in Perth this summer, as well as at their Worldview Studio, where monthly musical events are being planned for this year.

For Mackay, art is a way of life and a business at the same time. She loves to walk and paddle, experiencing the landscape first hand, and the capturing it as a painter and a scultptor.

“Art is my language – it is my way to convey to the world what is important to me. It is a conversation that can only be completed by the viewer. That connection is what my art is all about.”

With the move from Ottawa to the Sharbot Lake area, Janet and her partner are working on increasing awareness to the community near and far that they are open for business and welcome visitors to their new lakeside studio and gallery. Janet welcomes you to visit the website to see their work and to arrange a visit : www.worldviewstudio.ca