Featured Artist

Jeff Joyce brings place into his art practice, pulling from his experience of walking through the landscape as the genesis for his drawings and paintings.

When did you decide to become a painter?

I grew up in North Carolina and knew at an early age that I wanted to be an artist, without a clue what that meant; I just had this desire. I had the good luck to land at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, which had a smashing art faculty in the 1970s. A professor from Columbia University had been scouted to set up an art department, and he brought with him amazing people, art historians and professors. My teacher was a sculptor named Peter Agostini, who was good friends with Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. His work in the early 1960s was very proto pop. He made beautiful plaster castings of drapery and balloons, decades before Jeff Koons. I studied painting with him and was introduced to Gian Lorenzo Bernini, as Agostini was mad for Italian Baroque art and modernist color theory.

One day, he looked at my figure drawings and a painting I had done in his class and said, “You need to move to New York and be uncomfortable.” At the time, I was a clean-cut middle-class southern boy. He knew I needed to get out of that environment to experience a larger world. 

My acceptance letter to the New York Studio School was my ticket out of small-town North Carolina. 

How did your work change once you got there?

I had dreamed a short-lived (and rather foolish) fantasy of being a New York abstract painter following in the footsteps of de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Jasper Johns. However, my ship was swiftly righted at NYSS under the mentoring of Gretna Campbell, who saw in my early landscapes where my true force appeared to be heading. I honed my skills, spending four hours drawing every morning and four hours painting every afternoon. It was a real workout, studying with some of the best artists of the time, particularly my mentor Jake Berthot, a Zen thinker and an excellent painter who also deeply influenced me.

How did you wind up in Connecticut?

My best friend, the late painter Duncan Hannah, had a 19th-century cottage here in Litchfield County, where I visited often and just fell in love with the place. His sage advice to me was, “Don’t purchase an apartment in New York; move up to Litchfield County and enjoy bohemian country life.” I’ve been in the area for 11 years; however, it took me a few years to discover the essence of this landscape. 

Yes, the world can be running on different axes, but there’s something substantial about the sense of place. One can go out into a back corner of your garden, through the woods, or to the water’s edge: it’s nourishing and calming. 

I wanted to comprehend the sense of place and the solidity it gives. The city is exciting and glamorous, but, like many artists, my creative personality is sponge-like; our defenses are not always the greatest. We take in everything necessary for what we do. It’s who we are. So, making my work here, away from that whirlwind, is remarkably centering. And, this center of my work, the overriding subject, concerns nature. The most crucial aspect of any art form involving nature –  landscape painting, earth art, or writing – is that the spirit of place should be the driving force. It’s the essence of how an individual or group responds to a particular area. It can be poetic, like the work of Mary Oliver, or it can go dark, full of blood and soil. It’s the full range of human interaction with nature that is tangible.

It’s unique that you found your passion early and followed it through.

Ever since my son was young, I’ve always told him that you have two jobs in life. The first is to find out why you’re here, your purpose. The second is to do that as well as you can. If we don’t fulfill our purpose, we’re miserable.

I try to get outside daily to cast about. Fortunately, Sharon has a lot of land-trust property, which I love to walk on, especially the agricultural fields, which are likely 19th-century hay fields. I usually work in the studio in the afternoon, and there can be a tiny breakthrough that might not even be perceptible from the outside that makes the day and leaves something on which I can build the next day, the gesture that remains on the paper or canvas. Or, if you’re John Cage, in the air. That’s the work. 

It can be a visual response to the seasons in the most basic and immediate way, but it’s not systematic.  I often carry two or even more trains of thought because if one of them starts flagging or failing, another way of looking at it will come into play and inform it in some way. You hone your muscles within your practice and develop the tangible essence of knowing when you have found something while casting about. Everything else is also the work, the thinking, the sorting, or the walking. Making art involves learning to pivot and adjust when the work is going well, so the process shifts onto the next ride. Good work has a shelf life, and you need to pivot in the work to keep it alive. So, you can’t get too high on your own supply. It’s humbling and a gift to make a solid piece. 

Also, I feel the happy accidents remind us that we are constantly working in the unknown, which is an exciting place. We often do not know how each piece will evolve, which is the adventure that feeds our curiosity. 

What advice do you have for young artists today?

When I talk to young artists or students, I try to instill an awareness that you cannot be in this to make money. It can’t even be a consideration. When you’re making art, it depreciates the process by bringing lucre into the act; it takes the life out of it. So again, like casting about, we also have to do it as though it’s the last thing we do, and nobody will care. There is an excellent Jasper Johns quote, “To be an artist means giving up every illusion, including the illusion of becoming a good artist.” Do everything and dig into it deeply. The residual result is your style. You can’t create a style; your style just happens when you do the other stuff.  

Who has helped mark your pathway, and who do you read along the way?

My mother encouraged me to follow my dreams; my family had no artists. I’ve had this desire since childhood, and she indulged me in it. I don’t know why, because we weren’t wealthy. The assumption was always that you won’t make a living as an artist; you should think about something else to sustain you. 

I discovered the poet Shelley in high school; he opened the door to 19th-century English romantic painting, Constable, Gainsborough, and the Northern European Casper David Friedrich. Gretna Campbell, my teacher, opened my eyes to the play of light and utilizing the whole space of the canvas. Also, Henry David Thoreau’s approach to being in nature, Walden, is my bible. 

Another painter who was transformative for me was Albert York. I was in my early 20s and had a crisis over this idea of scale in abstraction. I saw this little flower still life, by Albert York, just beautifully painted, so sumptuous, full of depth and atmosphere, yet it felt strange, which pulled my eye and my mind into it. This innocent little work has a stinger on the end. So, Albert York taught me you could paint trees and mountain sides on a modest scale in an old-fashioned way, the same way they did 150 years ago, and it can still be new. 

So, my central theme is the mutability of painting. When you paint a simple tree or a cloud that has been done a million times, how does it acquire an edge or a new meaning? Painting reinvents itself; it just won’t die. It is exciting to take something you see every day and somehow make it different. 

Another of my favorite painters is the mysterious Giorgione. His assistants learned to ape his style, which resulted in multiple fake Giorgione paintings on the market. One of his assistants, Pietro Muttoni, known as Della Vecchia, could paint in a way that made the work look instantly aged using various tricks, another concept that fascinates me. 

Is that what motivates your practice?

Yes, I’m constantly looking at places I’ve seen thousands of times, searching for a different light, a different angle, a different time of day. There’s something about that line, the repetition of specific motifs and images. There is a dopamine aspect to doing the work, so I repeat images; I went back through a catalog of images I made in the early 80s of my painting. Over time, if you look back over your work, the past ten or twenty years, someone else, perhaps even more than yourself, would start to see, oh, you’re doing that thing again, and it is always related. So, our work also teaches us who we are. It is both humbling and empowering. 

Can you discuss your book covers?

They began as just a salvage operation. As you know, I often go to the Town Transfer Station, where there are tons of books in the Swap Shop. I cut the covers off and use them as canvases.  

I am talking about the book cover itself as a color element. I tend to spend 20 minutes or half an hour working on it. My practice is about the landscape; it has nothing to do with a particular book. It is about the material of the cover and the recycling of material. Recycling is an integral part of it, and liberating, as the substrate is chosen for me. I cannot rip anything out if it’s a book I’ve read or liked. I remove the cover and start drawing on the book paper that already has an embedded patina. It’s a found object, a gift. Occasionally, I incorporate the stamped gold leaf on the cover or the book’s content as part of a series, which is another gift. 

It’s such a gift; these pieces have wonderful etchings of the fabric and the vertical and horizontal lines, which add to their texture.  

If you could beg, borrow, or steal a piece of work from anywhere in the world, what would it be?

 Oh well, there’s a great Corot at the Frick, or any Corot. Perhaps a little Albert York still life would be great, slipped into a pocket. I would love to live with a piece of his work. 

I could happily live with a Giorgio Morandi etching, one of his beautifully simple drypoint etchings. He collected old book paper to print them on, so they instantly looked 100 years old.

A patina takes time to embed onto an object, not unlike the desire lines we create when walking a beloved path. Jeff Joyce embraces simple living within his natural surroundings, constantly uncovering a fresh perspective for his practice. He encompasses an edge of the 19th century, yet the work feels current as he discusses the places and habitats he visits. Large graphite drawings of winter trees starkly emphasize the bitter cold on a grey, snow-bound field inviting the viewer to sense the wind flurry brushing your face, whilst you warm your hands on a welcome cup of tea. •

Upcoming shows: Jeff Joyce has a show this summer at Judy Black Park, judyblackpark.org at Washington Depot, and he recently had a show at Standard Space in Sharon, CT. standardspace.net.

To learn more about Jeff Joyce, you can visit him on his website at jeffjoyceart.com, or his Instagram @the.joycer.