Up until a few years ago, Los Gatos artist Janet Kruskamp was collecting media articles on her work published nationwide and adding to a long list of International collectors, awards, one-woman shows and museum exhibits like any successful painter.

Called “Santa Clara Valley’s foremost exponent of Romantic Realism” by an area newspaper, she did a collection of American scene paintings that became an Official San Jose Bicentennial event. It seemed her star had risen. Today, no exhibits, no awards. Why?

Because Kruskamp has turned to commissioned portraiture – and may now be “the foremost exponent” of that art here. She’s simply too busy to paint for shows.

Criss-crossing the dusty back roads of America for three years in the ‘70s with her “incredibly supportive” husband Hardy at the wheel, Kruskamp came up with a vision of the country that circumvented the glitz and explored the enduring, the humble, the real and became the centennial collection.

Details tell her story: revealing bits of trash in an abandoned house, railroad tracks, the ancient county store/gas station, roadside wildflowers. A few years later she stumped inner-city streets, and her Transition Series of paintings at the San Jose Museum of Art recorded San Jose’s decay and old-fashioned beauty poised on the brink of revitalization. A town resident for 21 years, she made her surroundings into meticulous paintings of a Los Gatos that may not be here forever.

This intense scrutiny results in closely detailed work where every leaf and blade of grass gets a heightened reality. A sure and subtle hand with light, shadow and color puts the Kruskamp stamp on the most exact portrayal of client or backyard.

Human subjects can’t escape the scrutiny, whether a lanky-haired child, rumpled billboard painter or old man whose wrinkled skin folds around his hawk-like nose.

“This is what we look like,” she said, pointing to a thunder-thighed matron in a bathing suit. “I try to record events, the way we live-that’s what an American painter does.”

Although Norman Rockwell was her first idol, she veered from his overt nostalgia. But like him, she captures brief and poignant moments in time that are metaphors for all things human.

Portraiture, however, often challenges her honesty and immediacy. Clients expect the traditional poses. We seem to have an idealized idea of what we, or our children, look like.

“I want people caught in the act of being themselves, to catch the moment – that’s what the Impressionists did. Otherwise, get a photographer. I always encourage people to have a thoughtful or characteristic expression rather than a smile showing all the teeth.”

She works America into portraits, whether of fields or gardens, old front porches or crumbling walls. And she likes to hide little “surprises” within, like the mouse in an eight-foot tall commission of a modern high-rise. There’s the inevitable pampered pet, living or dead, even one commissioned from a rancher for six paintings of cows and rolling fields.