Recipient Information
Location
Prospect, Kentucky
Medium
Painting
Year of Award
2021
Grant or Fellowship
Southern Prize and State Fellowship
Grant Amount
$5,000
Artist Biography
Kentucky painter Joyce Garner (b. 1947, Covington, KY) has had solo shows at the Thyen-Clark Cultural Center (IN) (upcoming); the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art (KY); the Carnegie (KY); Indiana University Southeast; the University of Evansville Melvin Peterson Gallery; the Archabbey Library Gallery at St. Meinrad; Germantown Performing Arts Centre (TN); Krempp Gallery of Jasper Arts Center (IN); the Gateway Regional Art Center (KY); Oakland City University (IN); the Headley-Whitney Museum (KY); and various galleries in Indiana, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee. She earned a B.S. from the University of Kentucky.
Artist Statement
Wall-sized canvases let me explore the complexity of family through time. I was born in Kentucky and stayed on for family. Moving to the biggest city gave me arts community.
My paintings are filled with hopes, regrets, and wishes—about the past and the future. They are like an ancestry chart or family tree where each choice branches onward...emotional dialogues. The interactions are not just within a family but with a family history, which includes society at large and our natural world. Working big lets me paint novels rather than poems. But I’m an emotional artist rather than intellectual, and it comes out in the color.
I have an extended allegory of people coming together around a table. Helpful figures of speech: get everyone together around the table, turn the table, wait on tables, get a seat at the table, set the table, put something on the table (or take it off), table it for now, no room at the table, under the table.
A painting might start with a circle for the table, and then I draw some chairs—empty. Then I get to seat a person. They might be young/old, shy/extrovert, sly/unknowing, a participant or a witness, involved or oblivious or dreaming.
My intent for my work is that I love to sit in front of a piece in the mornings with a cup of hot tea in my hands, and let my mind go. I want art that gives me a place to go.
Lazy Susan
Year: 2019
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 77 x 114 inches
“Lazy Susan” has a disguised artist figure—the disguise is the stockings, heels and gloves— sitting on a lazy susan on top of a table. She slowly turns and looks out in all directions, thinking let me see, just wait a minute. The hares hold the leash on the hound. In 2019 Pinocchio is growing his nose. There are worry beads for when they are needed.
I paint as I live but not what I live. My hope is there is room in each painting for a connection to flicker between us. These paintings are not supposed to be just my story but stories I see all around me.
Musical Chairs
Year: 2019
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 60 x 168 inches
“Musical Chairs” looks back at childhood birthday parties. They were fun but there was also the sinking feeling of being left out. Play it safe and secure your chair, or take a risk.
Bluegrass music inspired this painting. There is blue grass painted in there too, but I was thinking about music and family. In my childhood, music was only at church. I sang in the Trinity Methodist choir so I learned church hymns, and I had some piano lessons.
There was a split in my family, some were very fundamentalist. In Laurel County, my grandmother had a pump organ in her house. But nobody ever touched it.
When my grandfather died, his viewing was in the front room of the house. But you couldn't get buried without a preacher so after the viewing everyone went to church. There the preacher preached damnation on my grandfather's soul. I don't know why. I don't know what he did.
Checking It Twice
Year: 2020
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 72 x 72 inches
Here is another table painting, with a glass top table. It's very Matisse-like. You can look through the glass and see the carpet and a barefoot child. The child has a pencil and paper; the grandmother next to her has her face covered and is just thinking about things. They have a cutting board with cored apple slices and cheese. A winged nanny goat with a fruit bowl doubles up the grandmother or “nanny” part of the story.
In this painting and three that followed (Bottle of Wine 2, Work In Progress 2020, Row Row Your Boat), horizontal bands provide the structure. I was thinking about archeology, how things are found in bands or layers. To figure out what a thing was, you look at the other things in that layer.
Row Row Your Boat
Year: 2021
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 80 x 95 inches
My Covington KY childhood did not have music at home. Music was at church, Trinity Methodist, and I had one music lesson a week at school. Row Row Your Boat is a school kind of song, where you sing it in rounds. Then you try to keep track of where you are supposed to be in the song, and not get confused by what other children are singing.
This painting has bands. The brown band is work, where you row row row. The blue band is where you go “gently down the stream, merrily...” The peach band is the dream, “life is but a dream.” The dreams in the peach band leak down into the work band.
Pears
Year: 2021
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 81 x 189 inches
The Statue of Liberty holds a tablet, referring to the Declaration of Independence, but Miss Liberty really needed a drum so I painted her one. The words are from “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazurus “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
Then I painted Emma, the author and activist, and gave her the biggest drum of all.
Speaking of big, there is Niki de Saint Phalle, one of her “monumental Nanas.” I painted her name on her Nana's side.
Next is mother nature. Circle around and down and see the wolves and raven, an example of species interdependence.
Pears (detail)
Year: 2021
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 81 x 189 inches
Here is a detail from Pears, of the wolves and a raven. In nature, ravens are scavengers while wolves are predators. Ravens accompany wolves on the hunt. They can alert the wolves when they sight prey, and even lead wolves to it. Their relationship is mutually beneficial.
Pears (detail)
Year: 2021
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 81 x 189 inches
Here is the mother nature detail from Pears.
Like many Appalachian families who migrated to the Covington area for work, about every weekend we drove home to Laurel County.
My parents put a mattress in the back of their '47 Chevrolet so I could sleep during the trip. And when we got there to my grandmother's, not only would it be dark outside because it was late, but it would also just be... dark. They didn't have electricity. It was different than in Covington.
Mama Said (There'd Be Days Like This)
Year: 2019
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 60 x 84 inches
I painted an urban cocktail party, so of course Ruth Bader Ginsberg would bring the cheese plate. But it came out a Kentucky countrified version with animals and kids.
My sister was 8 years older than me and when she was little she had a pet white rabbit, and it was really a pet.
But time is a river and it doesn't hold still. Later my father was laid off from the steel mill in Covington, so my mother rented out the top of our house—to a hunter.
He brought back dead rabbits, which went in the iron skillet, and a nest of live little brown ones that went in the hutch and became my “pet rabbits.” Except they weren't really pets, one would disappear from the hutch from time to time. It was not spoken of.
Bottle of Wine #2
Year: 2020
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 50 x 92 inches
This was painted during the first isolating brunt of Covid-19. I have risk factors, and I have not been anywhere but my home and studio since the first shutdown.
The setting feels artificial, as do the flowers, and yet a petal falls on the bench. The intergenerational figures have an almost paper doll quality, with light outlines. That is a BIG bottle of wine. The snail is a reference to the garden. I was glad to be able to go outside and get away a little bit.
Work In Progress 2020
Year: 2020
Medium: oil on canvas
Size (h x w x d): 54 x 86 x 1.5 inches
This piece will get put on stretchers at some point but during the pandemic shutdown of 2020, it got hard for a while to get the supplies to make the stretcher bars. So I exhibited the piece like this, unstretched and tacked to the gallery wall just like it was done in the studio.
A small painting of an apple breaks the top line. It was an accidental assemblage, in that I just stuck the apple painting up there to get it out of the way when I was organizing the studio. But I liked it.
The ghost figure showed up in 2020 for obvious reasons. See her also in Bottle of Wine #2.