Before she ever picked up a brush, Janine McCray-Booker spent years as a nurse — showing up in the most sacred and difficult moments of human life. She sat with patients in their pain. She celebrated their victories. She learned early that healing is not just physical. It lives in what we feel, what we express, and what we leave behind.

When Janine lost her daughter Shannan to cancer, the world got very quiet. And in that quiet, she found paint.

What began as a way to survive grief became something far greater. Every time Janine stands before a canvas, she feels Shannan with her — guiding her hand, speaking through color, alive in every bold stroke of acrylic. Painting is not just her art. It is her conversation. Her prayer. Her way of keeping her daughter’s light burning in the world.

That is what you feel when you look at her work. You are not just seeing a painting. You are receiving something — a message carried through a mother’s love, translated into color, and placed exactly where it needs to be in your life.

Her first collection features 35 original acrylic paintings. Each one is a portrait of feminine power — bold, vibrant, and unapologetically alive. Bald women who carry fire and grace. Women who have been through something and come out luminous. Women who look like strength feels.

Janine is also the author of a 10-book children’s series, the founder of Healing Art Together — a community built on the belief that creativity heals what words cannot reach — and a teaching artist who has introduced hundreds of people to the transformative power of painting for the first time.

Her work has been exhibited across Long Island, graced the cover of a published book, and found its way into the homes and hearts of friends, family, and community — who say the same thing when they see it for the first time — “I felt seen.”