About Corey
My name is Corey Janssens and I am a self-taught painter and sculptor. I was born in 1977 and spent most of my childhood playing in the woods with my older brother, Charlie, in the small town of Derby, Kansas. Trouble followed us there, late into the night.
In early childhood, I had a need to create alternative means of expressing myself. I was always drawing and building. I found comfort making statues, forts and little robots out of paperclips and torn-apart, discarded radios. And Legos! Man, did I love those Legos! Many hours were spent holed up in my room with those wonderful toys. In adolescence, my creations took new forms: poetry, art, and romance.
I also worked in the fast food biz. A year of making sandwiches led me to believe that furthering my education might not be such a bad idea. So I went to college at Wichita State University, majoring in sculpting.
Enthusiasm about college quickly dissipated when I realized all I could do with a sculpting degree is teach. Not that I think there is anything wrong with teaching, I just could never imagine having that kind of patience with kids. I know I was frustrating for my teachers! Faced with that reality, I promptly dropped out of college and enlisted in the army. I became a UAV pilot and did a couple of tours in Macedonia and Kosovo. It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Even though those countries were engaged in civil wars and life was hard there, it was some of the most beautiful scenery I had ever seen. And the people over there were impressive, very cultured and very proud. They had an appreciation for life that being a busy American makes you forget.
My obligation to the army ended, but due to the Iraq war I was under stop-loss (the army wouldn't let me go). Six months later they lifted the stop-loss, and it was better than escaping high school. I had started painting the last year I was in the military, and knew that I wanted to really pursue some form of art. I moved back to Kansas and sampled a variety of jobs, did a few plays for a local theatre troop, wrote poetry and painted. But I missed sculpting and longed to do art full-time.
One summer several years ago, I was playing the role of Iago in Othello and met a great woman named Michele, who was playing my wife in the show. I made the bold move to her home in Newton, thirty minutes north of Wichita, Kansas, to pursue my peace and my future. Burgeoning self-reliance and pursuit of accountability were rewarded with an offer for an assistantship with Conrad Snider, a large-scale clay sculptor who happened to be based in Newton.
Now I work. I build. I paint.
I play in the woods.