EXHIBITION DATES : 6/9-19/10
ENQUIRE ABOUT AVAILABLE WORKS & PRICES : click here
INTRODUCTION :
“Tis said far down beneath the wild commotion.
That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore”.
- Harriet Beecher, American Author and Abolishionist, 1811-1896
Do words help? I don’t know. If I write words am I saying the same thing as before but in a slightly different way? Like my paintings, I am tempted at this point, to be speechless, a little.
The journey is a continuation of the same journey; the new paintings reflecting the next ‘section’.
That peaceful stillness reigneth evermore”.
- Harriet Beecher, American Author and Abolishionist, 1811-1896
Do words help? I don’t know. If I write words am I saying the same thing as before but in a slightly different way? Like my paintings, I am tempted at this point, to be speechless, a little.
The journey is a continuation of the same journey; the new paintings reflecting the next ‘section’.
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Each painting starts at a point of not knowing, not thinking; nothing. If you were to watch me in my ‘studio’ I think you might find it quite a joke! Sitting silently, ‘ half -hearing’, dithering, piecing bits together. Heaving large paintings around a tiny space, foraging for scraps of old paintings, shuffling around on my knees (causing callouses on my knees and feet!). All in order to make a stammering start. Painting and overpainting, I often find that the exploration leads me back to another portrait, another lone figure, until I recognise something fractionally new that utters itself into the painting and my heart responds. A tiny breakthrough… and so there is this spiritual shuffle… both feeble and true.
It catches me unawares when, for example, a feather appears in my paintings and the feather feels like it is one of those tiny breakthroughs… but I am reluctant to ‘speak’ that, incase it becomes something other than it is.
Joy Wolfenden Brown, 2024
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started.
And we know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of the earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always-
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well.”
T.S. Elliot ‘Little Gidding’
ONLINE CATALOGUE :
“Thus am I ‘a feather on the breath of God”
EXHIBITION ARTWORKS (CLICK FOR FULL DETAILS) :
BIOGRAPHY :
Joy Wolfenden Brown’s intimate oil paintings feel hauntingly familiar, possessing a raw emotional, honesty. She captures fleeting fragments of memory, moments in time where the inherent vulnerability of the figures depicted, often in isolation, is palpable. These are lovingly yet spontaneously executed reflections on the human condition, which have an unnervingly, yet simultaneously comforting, unguarded quality.
Joy Wolfenden Brown is a British artist born in Stamford, Lincolnshire. She currently lives in Bude, North Cornwall. She graduated from Leeds University then completed a post-graduate diploma in Art Therapy at Hertfordshire College of Art & Design and worked as an Art Therapist for ten years before moving to Cornwall in 1999. Since then she has had numerous solo exhibitions and was the First Prize Winner in The National Open Art Competition, 2012. She was also awarded the Somerville Gallery painting prize in 2003 and first prize winner at the Sherborne Open in 2007 and the Evolver prize at The RWA in 2019 and the Judges Choice at the Chaiya Art Award 2023. Works were acquired by the Anthony Pettullo Outsider Art Collection in Milwaukee with further works held in collections worldwide.