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?

Joanna Goodrich Whitney was born in Berkeley, California, in 1962 into an artistic and philanthropic family. She was encouraged and educated in the arts from a very young age. She attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, graduating with her BFA in Illustration in 1985.

Whitney worked as a commercial illustrator and conceptual artist in New York, for the Hartford Courant, Cleveland Plain Dealer, and Carroll & Graf Publishers, until 1989, when a series of events brought her attention to an inward source. She moved to the artist's colony, Woodstock, New York, to pursue this new vision.

Whitney began using paintings in performance, collaboratively with poets and musicians and in 1992, went on to pursue her Masters in Fine Arts in Integrated Electronic Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, NY. Her Master's Thesis, an integration of poetry and sculpture with painting-based video, was accompanied by improvised music and dance, in a 30-minute performance, in December of 1994, at the RPI Playhouse in Troy, NY.

Upon graduating with her MFA, Whitney returned to painting in oils with mixed media on canvas. Utilizing the concept of frame-to-frame time passage one finds in editing frames of video, she continued her exploration of series, individuality, cooperation, interdependence, abstraction & realizm, utilizing photographic collage, often painting large paintings and then cutting them up into smaller pieces to be shown together but separately.

In 2003, while traveling, Whitney completed 30 small multimedia drawings which each included single-image photographic collage, colored pencil & water color and later, having settled, she began multiple-image photographic collage paintings on single and multiple canvases - painted together, later separated, or cut apart. Whitney now frames her own work so that she can create the illusion of separation and cooperation with her interrelated canvases.

Whitney continues to explore themes of unity and separation, abstraction and realism. She currently resides in Englewood, Colorado, and is actively showing in the Denver Metro Area. She teaches drawing & color theory at the Art Institute of Colorado and Intuitive Painting at various venues around the state.