
Artist Profile: Janine Robertson
Cape Cod Art / ART Annual 2025 / Art & Entertainment
Writer: Julie Craven Wagner
Artist Profile: Janine Robertson

Cape Cod Art / ART Annual 2025 / Art & Entertainment
Writer: Julie Craven Wagner
For Janine Robertson, the path from trompe l’oeil muralist to contemporary landscape painter was both a natural evolution and a conscious departure. A classically trained artist who began her career painting directly onto walls—sometimes perched on scaffolding, arms outstretched—she eventually traded her brushes on ladders for brushes on aluminum. What she carried with her from that earlier chapter was a honed technical skill and a deep appreciation for light, illusion, and atmosphere.

“I was always painting realism,” Robertson says, “and it got to the point where I wanted to loosen up.” The transition to landscape work began as her children went off to college, a personal shift that mirrored a professional one. And with that, she began to explore a softer, more interpretive visual language, one that landed somewhere between accurate depiction and emotive expression. The resulting works balance clarity with dreaminess, allowing viewers to feel as much as they see.
Cape Cod has been a constant source of inspiration for Robertson. “It has everything I need,” she says. “The marshes, the open skies, the coastal water—the light here moves in such beautiful, subtle ways.” Her connection to the region is reflected not only in her subject matter but in the quiet elegance of her compositions. Waves, skies, marsh grasses, and meandering rivers recur as themes, not just recorded from life but reimagined through her painterly process.
Robertson works primarily in oil, applying paint directly to brushed aluminum panels without primer or gesso. “That’s what gives the work its luminosity,” she explains. “The aluminum reflects light in a way that creates a depth you just can’t get with canvas.” She uses thin layers and big brushes—often no smaller than a half-inch flat—and occasionally brings in texture with paper towels or soft tools, never palette knives. “I want that glow to come through. It’s all about building up thin layers, not flattening them.”
Her palette is deliberately limited, which lends a cohesive, atmospheric quality across her body of work. “I start every piece the same way: with my transparent darks—gamboge yellow, ultramarine blue, red iron oxide—and then move into opaques,” she says. “There’s one color that makes it into every painting, though: Bluish Parma. It’s this lavender-gray that creates beautiful distance in a landscape. I use it in every sky, every tree line.”
Though she takes thousands of photos while exploring the shoreline from Connecticut to Chatham, her process is far from literal. “I’ll throw a few reference photos on the floor, pull from them loosely,” she says. “It’s about the feeling—the curve of a marsh, a shape in the sky, a shimmer on the water.” Her paintings often begin and end in a single day’s session. “I like to block in the whole composition wet on wet. It gives me freedom, avoids hard lines, and sets the tone early.”
Collectors of Robertson’s work often comment on its meditative quality. Her pieces feel spacious and still, but never static. “I think people are responding to that sense of quiet,” she says. “A gray day on the Cape, a soft horizon, something just on the edge of memory.”

When asked about how she presents the finished work, Robertson lights up. “I frame everything in floater frames—thin profile, minimal distraction,” she says. “There’s one I use with a black interior and a champagne exterior. It creates this beautiful shadow around the piece, makes the painting feel like it’s just floating in space.”
Though she now lives in Connecticut, Robertson’s heart clearly belongs to the Cape. “Honestly, I should live there,” she laughs. “Every time I go, I find more to fall in love with.” Until then, her modern and luminous take on Cape Cod’s coast and landscapes will have to exist in the paintings in local galleries and fortunate collectors near and far.
Janine Robertson’s work can be seen at Eisenhauer Gallery in Edgartown and at Sheldon Fine Art Gallery in Newport.