Joyce’s Paintings
Joyce’s husband Donal has curated a small selection of Joyce’s acrylic paintings.
While Joyce had always wanted to be an artist of some kind, for much of her life she felt it was an elusive dream. She majored in art at Lone Mountain College in the 1970s but became frustrated by her inability to translate the image in her mind onto canvas. Following college, she largely abandoned her artistic pursuits. But in the spring of 2018, at a time when her cancer was starting to rapidly progress, Joyce returned to the easel – a process that ultimately led her to the idea for the Deconstruction art show.
She decided to take a course in acrylic painting and set up a makeshift painter’s bench in a corner of her garage. Her work was entirely still life, usually of a fruit or flowers, and never directly addresses cancer. This was an act of self-therapy to reconnect with her creative side. Not that there weren’t setbacks – Joyce quickly grew exasperated with the same frustrations that she had faced in art school.
Although she ultimately didn’t pursue painting further, the process rekindled her creative desires and manifested the idea of treating her life as an art project with cancer at the forefront.
The first painting in the series, Apple Warmup, is an in-class assignment. The second, Quick in Red Bathroom, is a similar exercise based on a vase of sentimental value. The third entry, Flowers, is Joyce’s first painting from this time period that was created separately from her class. Homage to Raimond Staprans was inspired by a visit to Stapran’s exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Art. The final piece in this series, 1300 Gilman, depicts Joyce’s childhood home in the Hunter’s Point/Bayshore area of San Francisco just after the house was sold and represents Joyce reaching a point where she is finally starting to turn her artistic lens on herself.
Artist: Joyce Mallonee
Materials: Acrylic, canvas