London-born artist Janet Treby was raised in Bedfordshire, a small village in the English countryside, which likely continues to influence her paintings and prints of wildlife. She completed a two-year foundation course at Barnfield College, Luton and earned a degree in printmaking and sculpture at West Surrey College of Art and Design before finishing a post-graduate program in printmaking at the Slade School. As a young painter and printmaker she won The Lloyds Young Printmaker of the Year and the Elizabeth Greenshield Award, which allowed her to paint for a full year.

Treby’s works are primarily figurative and her subjects range from wildlife to nudes. Her subtle lines and play with movement in individual pieces reveal a complex body of work that holds a quiet emotional power and shows Treby to be an artist who is concerned with the delicate mysteries of nature and the beauty of the human spirit. “Creativity is essential for my existence, a primal need that has been with me ever since I had consciousness,” Treby says of her relationship to art. “It is perhaps the only tangible direct link with our higher selves—the real us rather than the little bit we know as flesh and blood. Maybe through art it is possible to touch the eternal for a second.”