Joanna Kaufman

Medium: Watercolor Painting

CREATIVE BEGINNINGS: Joanna’s grandmother introduced her to painting, sharing paints and brushes on summer visits, and she was inspired by her aunt, who had a love of long lines and painted earth scenes and stories of family on pottery. Receiving their lineages of visual expression and storytelling made an early impression that later came alive in Joanna’s paintings and storybooks.

ARTISTIC PATH: From early studies at the Inter American University in San German, Puerto Rico, Joanna recalls, 

I enrolled in a class dedicated wholly to the medium of watercolor. Our teacher took us to paint at special sites in the historic city. We studied the architectures of arched stone corridors, layered foliage in the rainforest, Coquí frogs, and the rustling shadows of palm trees falling in shades of cobalt on the land. It was in this class that I fell in love with watercolor, with its fluidity, and capacity to create a range of values with layers and water.

Recognizing then, how the medium of watercolor held a wondrous ground, Joanna has been working with it ever since. 

Alongside her engagement with painting, Joanna’s studies in language also grew. She completed a B.S. in Spanish education with a minor in photography at Northern Arizona University and, following her degree, worked for ten years as a Spanish language teacher in settings of community college and K-12 public education.

After receiving a twelve-book illustration contract, Joanna transitioned from teaching to freelance painting and illustration. Her studio practice deepened in mediums of art and language in the form of the book. Growth at this nexus of mediums led Joanna to complete an MFA in creative writing at PNCA of Willamette University, where she was awarded an alumni fellowship, allowing her to bring a series of forty-four paintings on relational embodiment to the Center for Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon. 

INSPIRATION AND PROCESS: For Joanna, it all starts here:

“It’s not complicated. We need it. I am very sensitive to beauty. We don’t speak of beauty anymore. In art criticism, we don’t mention beauty. It’s ‘demode’, out of fashion. But it isn’t really, beauty is an inner sense. And it makes us happy.” 

— Etel Adnan

Joanna’s inspiration comes from the beauty of the natural world as well as from the inner landscape of dreams. She believes that her primary materials as an artist are those of attention, observation, and of an intense love or concern for what may be translated to language on the page, or to paint on paper. 

Many of her paintings come directly from a dream or from a waking encounter with a place, plant, insect or animal. Working from memory, photograph, and direct observation, Joanna enjoys bringing natural subject matter and unique compositions to life in a range of sizes, from expansive formats for large interiors, to smaller, finely-detailed works on paper.

The physical materials in her work are those of watercolor and gouache paints, rendered in layers of wet-in-wet and dry brush techniques on a range of cotton papers that vary in thickness and surface finish, from smooth hot press to cold press papers containing more tooth.

Joanna often begins a new painting with a pencil sketch, which she does not erase but allows to exist as a layer of architecture in the finished work. In illustrative pieces, she often introduces soluble ink and mineral paint to further define texture and form.

LIFE AS A GORGE ARTIST: Joanna’s studio is located in Trout Lake, Washington, near the site of a village called Cranes’ Place for sandhill cranes which nested in wetlands near the base of Mt. Adams, an active stratovolcano in the Pacific Ring of Fire. Amid the continual changes of the land, Joanna is grateful to work from a place where she can bear daily witness to the intricate and storied lives of water and trees, insects and animals. She also finds solace working in community with artists, writers, and musicians of the Columbia Gorge region.

HOW TO LEARN MORE:

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