Born in the USA in 1932, Joan started her painting career as an abstract painter in Spain. Still painting today as a 93-year-old, Joan is known for her paintings of the nude body. Labelled as a feminist artist she said of women artists in NY in the 1970s “we need to be moved from the footnotes of history into the mainstream” and that to “hold on with your fingernails until you’re old enough to be no longer sexually threatening to (these) men”. She grew up in a time when a woman couldn’t buy a home or sign a lease. You had to be home before 10:30pm. In her 40’s, Joan returned to NY with her children and joined a group of female artists who provided support for each other, exhibited together and created together. The art world was dominated by white men. Entering the art scene was difficult as a female. Women couldn’t create art and were refused entry into the art world because of their sex. Institutional discrimination.
“I was interested in how my position as a woman affected my choices as an adult. I couldn’t possibly relate the same way as a man would, for instance, to the genre of the nude. By using myself, as the model, those differences immediately became self-evident.” Joan's work reflects the ongoing struggle for women’s equal representation and power to make decisions about their own bodies and sexuality while centring female empowerment through the self. (Skin in the Game)
Joan used her art as a platform to interrogate and critique the male gaze. “Her work is characterised by an unflinching examination of the ageing process. Her approach is both deeply personal and universally resonant, as she uses her own body as a reference point to explore broader themes of identity, self-perception and the relentless passage of time” (Skin in the Game 16/9/21). “Her work is not about idealisation, but rather about representation - depicting the body as it is, with all its imperfections, marks and changes.
Joan navigates the tension between female sexuality and the male gaze. “As you get older the male gaze is less sexual, less potent”.
Joan taught art for 22 years as a professor and this gave her the independence to take risks in her painting. She asks “what will be the next big movement? Will it be again white male, or truly multi-national and multi sexual?
She always had a camera close at hand. She used photography to record, simplify. Take close-ups, to distort. Turned the camera on herself. Asserting agency, distortions, excluding her face.
Colour and form are the basic building blocks of all her work. It is there that her work begins, how it develops and how it surprises. It is essential to the success of any piece. Always oil paint, sometimes collage and drawing is usually with oil pastels.
Process
Choose an image, project it, scale it, transform it, listen to music to clear the apace.
“I project the image and fool around with the composition by moving it until I find the right composition. I transform it with a crayon, pencil, whatever and then move onto paint. After the painting develops from a back and forth between me and the canvas. (It’s about) how I put the colour down, how the colour hits the canvas, what kind of mark it makes. It’s always a surprise. It’s a conversation that happens between the canvas and the Art brush. It’s a back-and-forth conversation.” YES!
Joans guiding principle is “simply to trust myself, to trust my own feelings regarding what the work is about and how it looks. It’s not to follow anyone or anything. It is more important to follow your own vision and believe in it. That in the end will be what is most important in the work”.
“Be visible. Stay the course. Your right gallery, person, moment will come. You need resilience and confidence in your own vision”. (Interview with Gail Levin 2023)