Artist feature: Joan Painter-Jones
Artist Joan Painter Jones shares with LFF about her evolution of media, her upcoming show, collaboration and more… All images and text ©https://joanpainterjones.wordpress.com/.
The Fixer
Where are you from? How did you get into art?
I am from a rural area in Michigan between Milan and Ann Arbor. I grew up in a house that my father built two miles from here. It’s still pretty quiet out here, which I like. I have always wanted to make marks, and have only wanted to make art. It was my joy. My mom and dad sent me to Eastern Michigan College, which became Eastern Michigan University while I was there. I loved the art classes back then.
The Fixer, view 2
What’s your impetus for creating work?
Nowadays I do my work upstairs in a studio/loft in the barn my husband built 28 years ago, though I started working in my kitchen on a table when I was doing watercolors in the late 70’s. I had a great professor/mentor from Eastern Michigan University in my last couple of years there, including post grad. By the mid to late 80’s I had already built out my watercolors so I needed deep frames, which were costly, especially for large work. I began, in about 1990, to work on canvas, and then on wood in acrylic paint. Then I began building out the wood, into works more close to 3-D.
I have used clay, and enjoyed making heads, mostly, but putting them on bodies made of wood and cloth, or torsos. One is in a big curved rusty pipe, with the head sticking out of one end, and legs out of the other. When the lady who fired my clay wasn’t able to any more, I went back to wood, and it became much more sculptural, sometimes adding old metal or found objects. A lot of my wood is also found. I like to use wood that has old paint on it, that starts my idea off, even if I eventually re-paint it.
My imagination is my impetus for my art. In watercolor, I ran the paint and imagined shapes in it, or put Saran wrap on the watercolor until it dried, and the shapes it made were my inspiration. Early on I blotted the paint with napkins or Kleenex, and it made nice “textures”. I used Saran wrap on acrylic paint too, on canvas, and it worked out okay. But with wood, the various shapes that I paint and attach to each other, I just use the acrylic.
Back Alley Busted
Tell me about your next exhibit.
My next exhibit that I know of is in Midland, MI’s Alden B. Dow Center for the Arts this coming fall. They have had to do work on the building after the floods from two broken dams earlier last year, so things have been put off for a while. I do enter art competitions, though for so long, with COVID, shows, even they were not happening, and then mostly virtual when they did. I am starting to find competitions just now, that I want to enter. I was re-working some works from only a few years ago during this “shutdown” of regular life, and just recently got inspired to do a more challenging work from some wire “fences” that I’d hung up from some nails, and finished one of them yesterday and am starting another. Sometimes my work doesn’t take long, and sometimes it does, depending on what it is, and how driven I feel to work on it.
Does collaboration play a role in your work?
I don’t collaborate. It’s too hard for me to find someone who’d do work like I do, and then, my work is so personal to me, that I really don’t want to “share”. One time, though, some years ago, a friend and I worked in my studio on a couple of things together, and using the things I had in my studio, we made some pretty neat things. I wasn’t terribly attached to them, though one work I did like a lot.
What’s it like creating art during this political climate?
I think the political climate of the past four years had my artist friends (and me) holding their breath, or wishing they could move to another country. I think some strong work came out of it, from those who tend to do political work. It mostly just made me angry and sad for our country to be going through those years, and very angry at the stripping of rights from people of color and Muslims, and the hatred incited by Mr. Trump. And the caging of people, including children!!!! I thought of doing work on that theme, but it was too sad at the time. I may yet do one on children being caged or separated from their parents by our government.
Does feminism play a role in your work?
I just do my work, and being a woman sometimes influences my work, butI don’t try to make work that one would call feminist.
https://joanpainterjones.wordpress.com/
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Les Femmes Folles is a volunteer organization founded in 2011 with the mission to support and promote women in all forms, styles and levels of art from around the world with the online journal, print annuals, exhibitions and events; originally inspired by artist Wanda Ewing and her curated exhibit by the name Les Femmes Folles (Wild Women). LFF was created and is curated by Sally Brown Deskins. LFF Books is a micro-feminist press that publishes 1-2 books per year by the creators of Les Femmes Folles including the award-winning Intimates & Fools (Laura Madeline Wiseman, 2014) , The Hunger of the Cheeky Sisters: Ten Tales (Laura Madeline Wiseman/Lauren Rinaldi, 2015 and Mes Predices (catalog of art/writing by Marie Peter Toltz, 2017). Other titles include Les Femmes Folles: The Women 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 available on blurb.com, including art, poetry and interview excerpts from women artists. A portion of the proceeds from LFF books and products benefit the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s Wanda Ewing Scholarship Fund.
Submissions always open: https://femmesfollesnebraska.tumblr.com/callforart-writing
