Where do the paintings come from?

Years of outdoor landscape painting and figure drawing have given Joyce McCarten a rich painting vocabulary which she uses to develop her oil and mixed media paintings. Through observation, interpretation, experimentation and pure imagination, she takes the familiar and alters it until it reflects her artistic vision. But, where does the vision come from?

Throughout her painting career, the vision has always come from the land. McCarten has traveled widely in the U.S., Europe, Africa and Asia and always carts along her portable easel and oil paints to record the sensations that speak to her own sensitivities. The wheat fields and mountains of Montana, the red dusty roads of Africa, Italy's Cinque Terre, the lavender fields of Provence, the red doors of the Forbidden City in Beijing and the ochre fields of Rousillon, France, are some of the places that have inspired her abstract paintings.

Lately, favorite objects and texts have re-entered McCarten's work. Her newest paintings are filled with the forms she loves: cups and bowls, Italian trees - and pears. And favorite sayings, like "Don't Postpone Joy" are meant for her own encouragement as well as for the public. Long-treasured pieces of metal and collected papers are now being included in these works. Using mixed media along with paint, McCarten is able to create paintings that are more than she could originally imagine, but are exactly what she wanted to say.

Joyce McCarten is the 2008 Torpedo Factory Artist of the Year, awarded by the Friends of the Torpedo Factory Art Center.