Femmes Fatales

The pinup has made a lot of progress since those oily calendars in the men’s room at the corner gas station, where Miss July demonstrated a profound affinity for spare tires. Considering local artist Jennifer Janesko‘s age (early 30s) and gender, it might seem she’d be unfamiliar with — or would have an aversion to — such images.

In fact, Janesko has such great affection for them that she’s made a career in the trade, investing classic images of sexy women with her own sensibility. Her first solo show opens with this weekend’s First Friday in the Crossroads District.

A few years out of Stephens College, Janesko made the shift from fashion illustration to the more sensual images she paints today. She didn’t label her work as pinups, though.

“People defined me that way before I did,” she says. “I [now] use pinup to allow people to immediately make a connection to artists like [Alberto] Vargas and [Patrick] Nagle and to what I do.” Has she warmed to the term over time? “I embrace it. To believe that sensuality exists is empowering.”

After a 1998 calendar containing a dozen of her creations sold well, Janesko’s work appeared in the June 1998 Playboy (and again in four subsequent issues) and has since been published in Maxim, Femme Fatale, and the provocatively titled German magazine Marquee Fetish. “They found one of my paintings of a woman in a leather bustier,” she recalls. “For them, it was anything leathery.”

Janesko says that, though men have usually made up the bulk of pinup artists, she prefers the softer work of their female counterparts, who instill their gender in the artwork. And if any women have ever seen her paintings as an objectification of the female body, she says she hasn’t met them. “What’s given me validation is that half of my collectors are women or couples,” she says. “Women say they [the representations] are beautiful, sensual and passionate. These are the things I feel inside.”