Janine Salway-Stubbs is a graduate of the National Art School, Sydney. She has spent the last two decades, heading up art departments and teaching art in high schools.

Her art has been described as captivating. It radiates a strange enchantment and is highly regarded by her peers. But her life has been one of great hardship and fraught with much difficulty at times. “None of those”, she says “have the power of touching our intrinsic self.” “We are plugged into the eternal somewhere and as long as we live in the moment and allow that power to encompass and guide us, then we are at one with the Universe,” she concluded.

As a four-year-old, Janine has been part of the tyranny of war, in her native Poland. Saved by the American occupation from the Rosenberg concentration camp, she and members of her family spent five years as refugees in Germany. Apart from her Polish heritage there is her great grandfather who was the Ritter von Wickenhauser of Prussia and her father who was probably related to the ancient Kazars somewhere in the distant past. Ms Salway-Stubbs jokingly states that all normal parochialisms and bigotries were eradicated from her genes before she surfaced on this Earth. She remembers fondly how her Aunt tried to enrol her in the German afternoon school in the township, after she had finished her Polish classes in the refugee camp.

Her work captivates the wonder of the moment, as well as our universal connectedness as fellow travellers on this planet. She relates through nature and through people. The depth of her sensations creates a strange enchantment. She says we are on loan on this planet and our pilgrimage is to affect a universal connectedness with one another. Although she has not travelled widely, she says that life is in small human portions. “Wherever one happens to be, is related to the whole. Every grain of sand carries the world in itself,” she said.