About Intuitive Art


I like to use the abstraction suggested by nature as a starting point. Looking deeply at my surroundings with a camera and finding abstraction in chance composition from life, I find my intuition is heightened and I become more sensitive: I can see beauty in everything. To juxtapose the sharpness of the photographic image with texture and brush stroke creates an optical illusion; what is real?

I was born in Berkeley, California, in 1962 and began drawing and painting as a child. In 1980, I moved to New York City to attend the School of Visual Arts. I graduated in 1985 with my Bachelors of Fine Arts in Illustration.
I worked as a commercial illustrator and conceptual artist until 1989, when a series of events brought my attention to an inward source of my work. I gave up commercial art and moved upstate to Woodstock, New York, to persue this new vision.
I began using my paintings in performance, with others doing poetry and music. In 1992, I went on to get my Masters in Fine Arts in Integrated Electronic Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY. My Master’s Thesis was an integration of poetry, video and accompanied by improvised music and dance, combined into a 30 minute performance, in December of 1994.
In 1996, I began painting in oils with mixed media on canvas. I painted on large canvases until 2001, when I began to travel and in a desire to record my experience, I switched to smaller drawings with colored pencil, on cotton rag-board. My work evolved to small colored-pencil, gouache, and photographic collage, on board utilizing my own photography. In 2004, having settled for a time in upstate New York, I began to expand on the theme of this photo collage to bring several images to medium-sized canvas with oil. I currently I am painting, with oil on multiple canvases with photographic collage. I currentl live in Englewood, CO.

--Joanna Whitney

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