New artwork on display at Library and Learning Center

The Shafter Library and Learning Center is busy offering a variety of classes to the young and old, while also supplying a library full of books to entertain and teach Shafter residents.

They also satisfy those residents who have a passion for art as well, displaying a different artist's work on their walls.

The center just changed the artwork to feature a local artist who spent over 30 years teaching in the classroom, as well as entertaining people with her talent of painting.

Janeen Carter Smith, a retired art, English and creative writing teacher, says that she has been looking at her surroundings through the lens of an artist for as long as she can remember. A Bakersfield native with two master's degrees and 50 years in the classroom, she and her husband have traveled extensively and lived abroad seeking a wider understanding of how people are more alike than different, despite language, skin color or politics. She tries to reflect that commonality in her painting.

Carter-Smith retired from the Richland School District after teaching in the district for 36 years.

Janeen began her formal art training in a conventional way, faithfully drafting the life around her, striving for realism. Then, as her education and exposure grew, her art journey shifted to more abstracted, colorful and spontaneous responses to the things she wanted to depict. Her current work is impressionistic and expressive, with dashes of intense color, thick acrylics and emotion. Carter-Smith's intent is to engage the viewer – to have the onlooker drift into the experience of the subject. "It doesn't matter if it is the California landscape, the chickens that range freely in my backyard, the cats that laze around my courtyard or the metaphoric figures that journey in my dreams, I am just a local artist who insists that we look closer at the beauty surrounding us."

Her art is on display during regular hours at the center, 236 James St., open weekdays 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.