Joy Walker Art

Artist Statement

"Joy, your wafer-thin pieces are fat-free, with no artificial colors or preservatives - irresistible to this ocular gourmet."

Sidney Geist
In a letter, October 1994

"None of these new works look like objects, surfaces or depictions.

One has the sense of peering through a sharp-edged hole in the wall at parts of some unknown visual expanse.

In fact, implied continuation of a field is a constant in Walker's oeuvre, along with an emotive display of color held in check by powerfully graphic shapes, whether geometric or organic."

Janet Koplos
Art in America, September 1995

"The delicious paradox of these 'thin' paintings is that they represent space within,

while the shape of the format itself suggests a distinct volume,

both conveyed with what can seem metallic blades of paint, slices of picture." . . .

. . . "The counterpoint of edge to colored surface has a deliberation, a clarity of resolution which is important." . . .

. . . "The counterpoint of edge to colored surface has a deliberation,

a clarity of resolution which is important." . . .

"Smart, funny delicate, odd.

These moderate-sized, incisive paintings balance

irony and passion in a kind of post-abstraction abstract painting."

George Woodman
catalog essay, March 1995

Memory plays a large part in Joy Walker's abstract painting.

Private emotions become forged visual statements, forged using both humor and the memory of that emotive state.

The facture of the paintings is the process of the memory made visual.

Certainly love, compassion and indignation have a place in painting, however thaey have been assisted more by abstract means rather than through the recogniation of actual objects or situations.

Joy Walker has been exhibiting paintings for thirty years. She is the winner of grants from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Artists Space, Change, Inc., the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council and the New York Studio School.

She wishes to thank the following art colonies for their support of her endeavors: Yaddo, MacDowell, Edward Albee, Millay, Byrdcliffe, Pouch Cove, Baie-Saint-Paul, Sheffield Lake, Cummington and Palisades Park.

"I feel compelled to paint.

I am grateful to anyone who wishes to immerse themselves in my compulsion."

Joy Walker
January 2000