Joyce Wellman

Abstract

Joyce Wellman Charles H. Rowell Click for larger view View full resolution Photograph courtesy of Sharon Farmer Portfolio of Artwork 977-980 [End Page 883] In 1981, Joyce Wellman (b. 1949), a native of Brooklyn, NY, decided to make Washington, DC, her home, where she continues to reside. She received a BA degree from City College of New York in 1972, and five years later she completed the master’s degree at the University of Massachusetts. During the late 1980s, she also studied painting as a graduate student at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), and during the late 1990s she received the MFA from MICA’s Mt. Royal School of Art. She has exhibited her artwork in various art venues including the Georgia Museum of Art (Athens), North Carolina State University Museum Gallery (Greensboro), The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland College Park, Washington’s Heurich Gallery (DC), and Kenya National Museum (Nairobi). Joyce Wellman describes her career in visual art as a journey from printmaking to abstract painting. “My artistic journey began in the early seventies when I was introduced to printmaking,” she says, and worked in various printmaking studios in New York City. There I was mentored by a host of artists in New York City. By 1981 I had relocated to Washington DC, to work and grow professionally. During the 1970s and early-1980s my concern was discovering a means by which to create an art vocabulary and grammar that included vibrant colors, cryptic marks, shapes and symbols that referenced mathematics, anthropomorphic forms and personal experiences and references to my growing up in a household where “The numbers” were played. I was on a journey to create work in the printmaking medium that became vehicles by which the viewer could journey through contemplative space. While in the mid-1980s I continued to make prints, my focus turned to painting, mixed media, and drawing. Most important to me of course was the development of my artistic voice as a painter and printmaker. It has always been through abstraction that I have sought to express my feelings. The use of intuition, textures, vivid colors, mark making, and a process-orientated approach aided me in digging deeply into my heart to express myself. Intuition aided by the use of stream consciousness fed the palette of my work from 1985 through the early-1990s. During this time I was using oil paint stick on paper to create intuitive large-scale color, charcoal, graphite, and gouache mixed media drawings. Intuition was to be the means by which the viewer could find his or her way around my work. During this period I processed my work by constructing, deconstructing, and reconstructing it. That meant tearing, pasting, coloring—the scrambling and unscrambling of ideas and processes. It was what I imagined that scientists do as they process combinations of DNA particles in search of a mapping mechanism for the human gene “scape.” In my case, I was in search of a means of creating a truly emotional work! In my recent body of work, I continue to be process-oriented. The works thematically have become more non-objective yet remain cryptically symbolic—even emotional. Thematically, I use abstract geometry as a means of connecting the viewers with simplicity and therefore to the spiritual in art. The vocabulary of my work continues to include textures, mark making, mixed media, and referential symbols, but includes the introduction of a new palette. It allows me to apply many layers of vibrant, [End Page 884] transparent color to the geometric and mathematically inspired content and canvases—a layering that is symbolic of the multi-faceted nature of human existence. from http://joycewellman.com/artisticjourney.shtml In August 2015 Joyce Wellman and I completed a short interview via email, which is represented below—an exchange that I thought would give her viewers another dimension of the landscape from which she creates. ROWELL: You have mounted online a brief statement about what led you to visual art. You started this journey a few years ago. Why do you still create visual art? What do the practice and the production of art offer you personally? What...