Help Ukraine: Without Reserve

Joy C Martindale is a visual artist based in the UK. Since graduating with a Masters from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2004, she has exhibited in Germany and the UK, and created and run participatory art-making community projects. Joy is currently enrolled on the Turps Correspondence Course.

“[Joy’s paintings are] giving me something that is not cemented in the knowingness of the world, but in my enquiring about it. They are not telling me what I know but are journeying with my thoughts, making the invisible possible.”

Andrea Medjesi-Jones, guest mentor review on the Turps Correspondence Course (2021)

I strive to make works that are full of vitality and have affective impact on their audience. Working primarily in water-based mediums, I use a call and response approach to make abstract paintings. There is always a stimulus, whether it is personal experience, or a piece of music, something I have read or heard, a colour observed or a previous sketch in my notebooks. Sometimes I hold on to that starting point through the whole journey of making a work and sometimes I let it go; or it can be a mixture of both and I will respond to a range of calls.

These are part of a number of devices I employ to structure the process of making a painting. I make my work in stages, reflecting and planning in between each stage. Within each stage I work in an expressive way engaging with the materiality of paint and using calligraphic lines and repetitions of motifs to create rhythmic arrangements and structures. I think a lot about ambiguity and placement and I always have in my head a notion that what I am seeking is to make something happen within a painting.

Memories, sensations and experiences are uncertain and their connections to the abstract works that they inform and inspire are tentative; nevertheless they are also integral to the story of a painting. From, for example, a piece of music, to my painting, to the viewer is a chain of sensations; these chains of sensations connect us to each other and help us make sense of our realities. The titles of my work and the accompanying short pieces of writing I often produce, highlight and examine these connections.

www.joycmartindale.com
@jcm_slideshow 
@joycmartindale