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Massachusetts artist Joan Lockhart, former graphic designer for numerous national magazines and books, celebrates her successful return to her professional roots as a painter in her visually exuberant and emotive show, “Lush Life,” featured through June 7.
Ms. Lockhart’s exhibition of recent works in acrylics and oils brings the progress of her career full circle from her college studies in the arts at UCLA and the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she earned a B.A. in photography and painting. The daughter of a “nomadic academic family” who spent her formative years in California, Hawaii and western Massachusetts, she completed graduate work at the Art Center of Design in Pasadena CA before returning to the East Coast to pursue a career in graphic design. Over more than a decade in New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts, she served as art director for national magazines including Sports Illustrated and Scientific American Explorations and designed books for publishers including Harry N. Abrams.
Ms. Lockhart’s rediscovery of her artistic origins as a painter followed a life-changing decision to set down roots and purchase a home in Rockport, Mass. “It had been over a decade since I had held a paint brush. I had been working as a graphic designer, married to the computer for nearly two decades. My recent rediscovery of painting has to do with settling—not settling for, but settling down. After years of moving around, covering much of the country in search of the perfect job, the perfect life, the idea of committing to one place was both my great challenge and my heart’s desire.”
“Settling down” in her new home near Boston “helped me to find freedom and to feel peace,” she observes. “Things like painting walls crazy colors (they’d always been white for the next tenant) and putting petunias in the ground unleashed a wild drive. My sheets and towels, my whole living space also began exploding in patterns, color and texture…. Before long, I ran out of walls to paint and was forced to turn the brush to canvas. I’ve hardly looked back, and on one small piece of land I find, in creativity, that my world is bigger than ever.”
Ms. Lockhart describes the works currently on display at the Good News Café as inspired by “the full gamut of human experience. When I confront the process of making art, I confront fear, love, wisdom, hope, despair, exuberance. In the best moments, I forget myself, and become myself.
“My voice is my vision. Communicating through bold splashes of cobalt blue and alizarin crimson, or a rich charcoal line, is both a joy and a challenge. I constantly seek to avoid simply describing something, but rather to create a new and honest reality through this painted image.”
In Ms. Lockhart’s artistic vision, exploration of harmony and contrast in color and form enables her to capture the ephemeral on canvas and thus provide fresh perspective on her world. “My mission is to find the edge between existence and spirit, in the savagery of one color careening against another—the most accidental moves and lines are often the most beautiful—and in the act of grabbing and holding a moment of fleeting time,” she declares. “In a successful canvas, my quest to be in the moment creates, in the end, its own reality.”
The painting featured on this page is "Sassafras Tea," an acrylic work on canvas by Joan Lockhart.
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