Shelli Joye

Shelli Renee Joye began working as a lighting consultant to Andy Warhol at the Factory in New York in 1969 and began painting in her own loft on Greene Street in 1970. Her work can be seen in Berkeley, CA, Austin, TX, Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia and Kharkov in the Ukraine.

Her style has been characterized as 'geocosmic color flow field' paintings of vibrant contrasting hues, textures, and value in dynamic flow patterns. She studied physics, mathematics and philosophy in college and has a B.S. and an M.A. She lived for nineteen years in Saudi Arabia and is a practicing contemplative attached to a monastery in Berkeley and currently has a studio in the east Oakland hills where she paints full time.

"To me, the heart of painting is the pure experience of the contemplative mystery, a threefold fusion of color and form and spirit embedded in my own present awareness and past memories and the future encounters of others with these things in my paintings.

I was born on the island of Trinidad, Isle of Hummingbirds, and one of my earliest childhood memories is going with my mother and father to an officer's club in Port O'Spain. I remember being captivated by an abstract painting on the wall, and gazing at it transfixedly. It was fascinating, so different from anything else I had yet experienced. We moved to London, where I collected color wax crayons and at five years old won an international coloring contest for children, held in an American newspaper. I have continued to explore color and awareness my entire life.

I love creating new categories of texture and colors by mixing paint with industrial and kitchen chemicals and organic substances. I've always done my paintings horizontally, usually on the floor, providing three dimensional surfaces on the canvas by inserting objects beneath the unstretched canvas. I consider gravity as a type of brush, a mysterious and living force through which the wet paint is coaxed to flow in organic patterns, much as the living earth creates geologic patterns, and I use heat lamps and warm air to evoke evaporation patterns and crystalline shapes from the seas of color.

Painting is to me as mysterious and magical an act as it was to the painters in the caves of Altamira and Lascaux at the end of the last ice age 14,000 years ago. I often begin a new painting under a full moon. When it is wet a painting is a living thing that changes every moment, needs coaxing and attention and interaction. If everything is right, the process of painting is a doorway to the heart of things, and if I'm able to get out of the way, I can see and feel the spirit flowing through the waters and colors and textures of the materials I bring to the canvas.

Some of my paintings are very organic: I use brown rice and pinto beans, dill and black pepper and herbs. I change the viscosity of the paint with thickening agents, organic and inorganic chemicals. My painting is like a dance between the canvas, colors, textures, myself and my own history and the living forces of gravity, heat, and light, weaving together into ever new realities. A real painting is a living thing, alive in the heart of the artist, of the observer, and of the object itself.

Website - www.shellireneejoye.com