From a few feet away, Janet Shea's art looks like oil on canvas. She saturates her landscapes with lush detail, but the pictures seem like those of any other still-life painter.

Step closer, and the true nature of Shea's medium makes itself apparent. She doesn't paint her pictures - not with a brush, anyway. She stitches them, just as one would stitch a quilt or tapestry.

Shea, 58, began thread painting in 1991, following years of becoming acquainted with her sewing machine as a mother of five. One day she tried combining her textile talents with her passion for oil painting, which Shea had practiced since her days as an art student at Colorado State University.

“I really just tried it off the top of my head,” she said. “I didn't want to let the (cloth) scraps go to waste.”

With a photograph as her guide, Shea began piecing together portions of cloth to match the color scheme of a landscape. She immediately discovered that the process was far more demanding than any form of brush painting.

“Sometimes the most challenging part of this is finding the time to do it,” Shea said.

At first, Shea could only complete one thread painting per year. Seeing the other side of one of Shea's canvases will show why. While the reverse side is a work of art in itself -like a photographic negative of the actual picture - the several hours Shea spent stitching it can be grasped with only a glimpse.

Thousands of threads, some only the most meager shade apart, wind through the pieces like tiny electrical wires.

The placement of each plays a critical part in capturing and shading the trees, rocks and water in Shea's landscapes.

Despite the sizable time commitment, Shea stuck with the craft because it appealed to her artistic sensibilities.

“It lets me be more free with the work - if I don't like something, I can just cut it off,” she said.

Following her first few works, which were dominated by patched-together pieces of cloth, Shea developed her thread painting technique by incorporating more stitching into her pictures. The threads provided Shea with a much more nuanced tool of depiction.

“With all the threads I have, it's just like a painter's palette,” she said.

Shea can now spin out as many as 10 thread paintings a year. In recent works, she has also expanded her arsenal of fabrics to include materials like horse hair, which she used to depict the mane of a swimming female in “Swimming With Loons.”

The same picture features stuffed tree branches that burst from the canvas with the texture of veins under skin.

Ultimately Shea would like to expand her thread-painting repertoire to include even more textured fabrics.

“I have a drawer full of bulky yarn that I'm waiting to use,” Shea said. “But you're a little limited by what you can stick under the sewing machine.”

Shea has always focused her thread-painting on landscapes, and she doesn't plan to start weaving more portraits or abstract art. She finds an inspiration in landscapes that empowers her creative process. In the spirit of expressionism, Shea's art captures the point where her feelings fuse with her experience of nature.

“Every one I do, I want a real connection with it and to find my heart in it,” Shea said. “I want to portray the feeling I get from nature so that people can feel it through the painting.”

The mystical quality surrounding “Swimming With Loons” stems from Shea's early-morning swims at a lake in the Adirondack Mountains. She romanticizes the experience with ethereal swirls of light lavender skin on the woman and pale orange in the sunrise. The picture, which depicts two loons swimming next to the lady in the lake, also weaves in the poetry of Howard Nelson, English professor at Cayuga Community College and Shea's longtime friend.

“It's extraordinary what she does with fabric and thread and quite miraculous, the way she gets such great detail and nuance,” Nelson said. “What she does is so unusual that it's all the more striking.”

Area art organizations have also found Shea's work fascinating. She has accumulated an impressive array of awards at local shows, including two first place awards in Mixed Media at the Central Adirondack Art Show. Beginning with her first exhibit at the Seneca Falls Women's Hall of Fame in _, Shea has had difficulty soaking in the recognition.

“I just kept saying to myself, 'I'm not an artist,'” she said.

Ironically, Shea can't exhibit her paintings amid their source of inspiration.

“Too much moisture is bad for them, so they don't lend themselves well to the outdoors,” she said.

Staff writer David Wilcox can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 245 or david.wilcox@lee.net