Born in Bristol, England in 1951 Joy studied art in Bristol and Birmingham graduating from Birmingham Art College in 1978, where she won the Dame Louisa Ryland Scholarship.

 After graduating she lived in London for 25 years where she ran a dual career as a manager of high profile environmental projects and working as an artist  exhibiting in galleries and international art fairs. In 2006 she moved to Piemonte, Italy and has since been exhibiting throughout Italy,.in Europe and the United States.

 Artist’s Statement

My work is about my response to the colour, space and light in the landscape. My aim is to paint the power and existence of the landscape, not the view of it.  I am inspired by the dominance of nature over man, but also the marks that man makes in the landscape. I am equally interested in the detail of nature and am excited by plant life, from the extraordinary wild flowers of a Piemonte Spring to the tangle of dead undergrowth of Autumn and Winter.

I work in my studio from sketches and photographs made in the landscape.  I usually work up larger drawings from my sketches, then start my paintings with a series of acrylic washes  moving onto oils at some stage.  I like to explore the quality of the paint,  often scraping paint off of the canvas revealing subtle textures and colours beneath and contrasting these with opaque textured paint. Although I use my drawings as a basis for my paintings I find that the painting  usually takes on its own direction and can move away entirely from the original drawings. For me this is all  a part of the process of painting and discovering the real subject matter.

Jim Woodman

fine art

 ©  Jim Woodman fine art 2020