Artist's Statements
January 2023
After early influences from the great American pioneers of abstraction, i.e. Rothko, Pollock, Barnet Newman, along with intensive studies of Pre Renaissance and Renaissance painting, my investigations in to the history of painting led me back in time, so to speak, into medieval painting.
I found the complex techniques required to enable the paintings to transcend their physicality, a perfect way to push the techniques of abstraction toward a better communication of their merits; particularly in the way that a painting can take a person’s mind to a place they may not have been before.
The digital age and fast access to information may have reduced our ability to look at anything for any length of time. My travels and immersion in ancient cultures has resulted in my wanting to capture at least some abiding spiritual depth, and a sense of place and of lost civilizations, from the ancient Maya, to the temples of Cambodia and the Far east; Stonehenge in England, etc.. These mysteries are worth preserving since we can’t always go there. Painting for me, including some ten years or so of inspiration from Icon painting, has become a way of holding onto memories, [some of course are not my own memories] and a way to bring the achievements of the past into a contemporary framework. In a way, taking a stand against the banality of constant information…Painting, if nothing else, can transport the mind to a new place, whilst at the same time reminding us of some of the great achievements in art, architecture and cultures of the past.
2004
I have lived all over the world, including many years in the Far East, and my current works include the somewhat romantic idea that exotic and mysterious places can be contained within painting - giving us all the taste of the unknown without having to make the journey ourselves.
In recent years I have made paintings that I hope contain the spirit of places as diverse as a pirate cemetery in Madagascar, the grand nineteenth-century hotels and palaces of India and the Far East, a Mayan temple in Southern Yucatan, of the remote deserts of North Africa, to name just a few. The most recent paintings in this exhibition are an attempt to deal with certain codes of ethics, aesthetics, and spirituality that run throughout the history of humanity. This includes the warrior code of the Samurai, the devotion and loyalty of people such as St Francis of Assisi, the great tradition of Russian Orthodox icon painting, and finally homage to the sublime, ethereal portraits of Leonardo da Vinci.
Island And Icons
March 2003
I've been drawn to islands all my life and grew up in Devon and Cornwall in southwestern England, amongst early memories of the sea and stories of smugglers and pirates, and later, the mists and fog of the Moorland and Celts and the mythology of the ancient world. I've lived on islands: the Maldives, Indian Ocean, Greek and Spanish islands, and keep on returning to them whenever I'm restless. In a recent exhibition that I named Architecture of Silence, I was thinking of sacred places, abbeys and Cathedrals perhaps, of darkened, candlelit rooms and the perfume of incense and spices from the East. Most of all, I was thinking of silence - the kind of silence I connect to icons, especially the great icons of the Byzantine period. In these paintings you see angels transfixed in ecstatic, petrified silence.
I've often thought, ''Is it possible to produce this kind of frozen silence in a painting, the kind that comes in the form of petrified longing? ''
Trying to connect these thoughts of Byzantine culture, my yearning for the islands and the ancient mysteries of prehistoric Britain is possible only through the traces and threads of my life that leave behind the idealized geometry of these paintings.
Steve Joy Studio
Contact Steve Joy Studio
Contact Steve Joy Studio
Contact Steve Joy Studio
E-mail for all enquiries