Jan Serr’s ‘Summer Paintings’

Fifty years of her paintings are on display at Villa Terrace in an exhibition focused on images of the Great Lakes shoreline—mostly the Milwaukee strand of Lake Michigan

by

Visual Arts

Jan Serr was on the pathway to becoming an opera singer—or at least a concert pianist. While in elementary school she spent countless hours on piano lessons, and at Bay View High School, she turned to singing. At Carroll College, Serr was a soloist in the choir. But the path turned again when she transferred to UWM.

“One of the requirements for my degree was art,” Serr recalls. She was assigned to a class taught by a guest instructor, Schomer Lichtner, one of Wisconsin’s most distinguished midcentury artists. She remembers him as a “charismatic, dedicated visual artist. I was already a disciplined musical artist. I knew about composition, light, color and line—everything that exists in music exists in visual art, just in a different medium.”

Fifty years of Serr’s paintings are now on display at Villa Terrace. The exhibition, “Summer Paintings,” focuses on images of the Great Lakes shoreline—mostly the Milwaukee strand of Lake Michigan but with a few impressions painted in Toronto during her Canadian sojourn in the ‘70s. Some of the larger pieces date from her UWM student days in the ‘60s. The most recent, Woman in an Emerald Dress (2016), is a canvas-filling portrait of an African American woman Serr observed on Bradford Beach.

Many of Serr’s “Summer Paintings” are rendered in bright colors with bold strokes. Sunbather #2 builds from a Technicolor green lawn, bright picnic blankets and a woman wearing polka dots. The brightness recedes in several paintings, including the earth-toned pastel Seagull #1. A portrait in full, Lifeguard, depicts a fully clothed man in long pants and shirt atop a lifeguard tower (would he dive into the water dressed like that?). Most of “Summer Paintings” are figurative, but a few slip into abstraction. The colored horizontals of Over Water, Sand, and Grass suggest Mark Rothko in a sunny mood. Water and Surf is a tactile impression of swirling pale blues and whites.

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Varied Inspirations

Serr has enjoyed a varied career teaching art at Toronto’s Sheridan School of Art & Design and UW-Stevens Point, with exhibits at galleries in Toronto, Chicago and elsewhere. In recent decades she’s been represented by Milwaukee’s Tory Folliard Gallery. She cites the great German Expressionists of a century ago, especially Max Beckmann and Käthe Kollwitz, as her initial inspiration, but her work took on the brighter shades of West Coast American figurative painters such as Richard Diebenkorn. She lived with her husband, entrepreneur John Shannon, in Racine for several years, and several her paintings are housed inside the Johnson Wax headquarters.

After returning to Milwaukee in 2008, Serr began roaming the beaches and bluffs overlooking the lake with a camera. “I took hundreds of photos, and when something intrigued me, I began to paint.” She spent hours near the shore each week and in all seasons. She recalls that her camera froze on a cold winter day. Along with the exhibit’s curator, Annemarie Sawkins, Serra choose paintings that fit Villa Terrace, a mansion-turned-museum perched above Lake Michigan.

The oils on boards or linen that line the museum’s upstairs hall and rooms are not merely painted versions of the photos Serr took. “Each painting began with a craving for a certain composition, a certain subject. The paintings are developed beyond the photographs—they are an expanded, exaggeration of the original photos”—the product of imagination as well as realism.

“Jan Serr: Summer Paintings” runs through Nov. 29 at Villa Terrace Museum & Gardens, 2022 N. Terrace Ave.