Interview with LA based Artist & Musician Janae Young

Janae’s demeanor is unassumingly smooth. Like honey butter smooth. Soft, gentle, easy in its movements though despite its subtlety, it’s incredibly hard to miss. Or at least that’s the understanding I got when finding myself in conversation with her post-yoga class, held in a hidden downtown art gallery on a late Sunday night.

But one look upon her more public personification — her instagram, for instance — gives a much more assertive and expressive, but no less strangely soothing enactment of her unique self.

“I would describe myself as spontaneous and raw, like a genuinely heartfelt underground non-conforming type vibe.” she told me.

Janae is an artist, in the truest sense; though ‘senses’ may be a more accurate word. Her talents span from canvas and acrylic to lyrical and melodic, all of which she shares publicly online and in the real world of the Los Angeles arts and social scenes. In all her many mediums, her work is bold expressionism, often mingling her many talents in visual and auditory delights, inviting the mind to open. I was first captivated by her music; a sound melodic and sweeping, sometimes dreamily so and yet at others, surreal and piercing as that found in her single ‘gypsy’.

“I rotate my time with projects now that I am into music and ventures other than art and have more resources. I create every aspect of a project from lyrics to recording with Logic Pro, to album art on my iPad and quick promo videos in iMovie, to art installations displaying pieces inspired by the music and I just let myself flow through the process.”

Her approach in allowing the masses to experience her work follows the recipe in which she creates it. She can be found — if you look — in wildly neon lit venues, raw backrooms watching live music, or on the streets of Los Angeles making art of her mere presence and anything she finds. In essence, she creates as freely as she explores.

In all these many spaces and throughout her trajectory from a little girl in Indiana to an LA woman, the work finds its own way through her.