Joan Willsher-Martel – Artist Biography
Joan Willsher-Martel, born in Victora in 1925, came east to Toronto in 1952, and quickly realized the significance of the new developments. A stay in New York, form 1956 to 1958, interested her in the exciting dialogue then being played out between the Canadians and the New York School. Although she had been painting the urbanscape, she became an abstract artist, if only to capture the essence of the natural world in paint. Upon her return to Toronto, she began to sort through modern art of the day to develop her own interpretation.
Her thoughts often returned to a memory of an incident in her youth, at age sixteen. In 1942, at the home of friends, she had seen a painting of trees by Canada's great early modernist, Emily Carr. She was never to meet Carr (she died in 1945) but retained an idea of her work in the way that artists do, with the thought of bringing it out at the right time. Only much later—in the 1970's—did it influence her choice of subject.
Her work as a mature artist was always to refer to the environment of the region in Canada from which she originated, British Columbia-- it's sea, mountains, forests and sky. Her technique details the landscape through tiny component dots that refer both to Monet and Pointillism, and J.M.W. Turner. There are also echoes in her work of the process of photomechanical four-colour reproduction, building up the image through a screen. As a result her work radiates with a gentle vibration: the effect is of forms silhouetted in the midst of atmospheric curtains of colour. their presence more spectral than physical.
Today, Willsher-Martel holds her ground in an increasingly complex art world, though now in her rich compendiums of light and colour, she gravitates more toward a search for meaning. Her way of speculating turns out to be much more significant than it first appeared: her big, beautiful, densely painted semi-abstractions set up an oblique dialogue between the legacies of abstraction and today's interest in narrative. However, in this dialogue, Ms. Willsher-Martel leans more towards the modern than postmodern: she is a sincere formalist who has made paintings with heroic, humanist values. To see her works massed together is to glimpse a grand obsession expressed with exquisite control, hedonistic flair, and stylistic sophistication.