Joyce Garner table paintings
  • Joyce Garner Paintings
  • 6 paintings
  • Joyce Garner large format + murals
  • Small Works < 60"
  • Cloud Nine series
  • "Table Paintings" Exhibition Proposal
  • Joyce Garner Exhibition Proposal
Joyce Garner
​Exhibition Proposal
What these paintings have in common is that they all respond to overwhelming events that impacted many people. Painting is my response to these events.

Paintings usually come from my own struggle, mostly emotional, to come to grips with difficult issues. The canvases are where I accomplish this. As was required on childhood math tests, I show all my work.

​Please note the scale of the canvases. There is some kind of relationship between the scale of events and the scale of the paintings.

Picture
tornado (2024)
72 x 72"
oil on canvas, stretched

On April 2, 2024 a EF-2 tornado (winds up to 120 miles per hour) struck my home. Somehow no one was harmed. Thirteen mature trees were lost and the house required a new roof. A tulip poplar over 100’ tall fell away from the house. When the tornado hit, the air turned grey.

Due to climate change, "tornado alley" is shifting east and my home city is now considered part of it. 

Picture
in progress & I quit (2025)
82 x 212"
oil on unstretched canvas installed with push pins
​
Right in the middle of developing this 18’ painting, the 2024 presidential election happened. My plan for the piece collapsed. What do you do when an 18’ painting in progress no longer makes sense? I kept trying to connect up all the parts and build a new picture… until January 13, 2025 when I put down the brush and declared “it’s in progress and I quit.”

Picture
worried woodpecker (2024)
72 x 72”
oil on stretched canvas

This painting has my personal reactions to climate change. How are fish sensitive to climate changes? Birds? Trees? People?

Picture
tulip poplar (2024)
80 x 195”
oil on unstretched canvas, installed with push pins 

It's not quite right to say this painting is about "death." Tulip poplars are not only the largest hardwood but the state tree of Kentucky and Indiana and Tennessee. They are plentiful at my longtime home on Happy Hollow Road. It interests me that the blossoms are 80’ up and serve as a rest stop for migrating monarch butterflies, Mexico to Canada. I first spotted the blossoms in our driveway in June decades ago—and fluttering monarchs in the treetops. Of course all was incorporated into my art beginning the 90s. Hares and rabbits are still about the quick passage of time. There is loss and grief yet wholeness. I’m not sure grief ever really passes but flowers and music and nature ease it.

Picture
2022 (2022)
84 x 192"
oil on unstretched canvas, installed with push pins

I wore myself out painting it [2022]. There is too much going on. There are Niki de Saint Phalle, her monumental Nanas, presiding over birth and death.​ The flood waters are rising, maybe we're going to be hit by a train again—it's the human condition. I can't even look at it. I started doing smaller landscapes, color and patterning, just to get away from it. I just continue to paint.

Picture
the weather outside is frightful
60 x 96"
oil on stretched canvas

Of course there is beauty and bounty but also erratic weather including wildfires.

Picture
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  • Joyce Garner Paintings
  • 6 paintings
  • Joyce Garner large format + murals
  • Small Works < 60"
  • Cloud Nine series
  • "Table Paintings" Exhibition Proposal
  • Joyce Garner Exhibition Proposal