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Horses galloping upon the walls of the studio, and smaller artworks coming to life from the upright easel or with the small stretched canvas rested onto a knee... They are all around, softening away the past seven years devoted to a long visual 'research' on 'Cars'. Nature, breath, muscle, life, now inhabit the space. Beauty and energy prevail. For a moment the concrete and mechanical forces of the metropolis give way to a surge of unbridled freedom. Some ghostly presences passing through the space, others marked and repetitive, emphasizing their existence, in the memory of the painter. Horses. In the beginning, they are all born out of 'The Galloping Horses Mural', apart from one, half-Trackhener, of the lineage Joyce's maternal family used to breed in Lithuania, than in Norway, extracted from a miniature advert in an equestrian magazine. It has a little white frame... Joyce also remembers a beautiful photography of her texan grand-father, in his seventies, looking down from the back of a mustang, in the Amarillo canyon where the family would spend week-ends. More sprung out of the miniature thumbnail images in the classified sections of a few equestrian magazines... Later other works on canvas, also in oil, as all of those in 'The Horse Series' are, worked on the surface of a table, and echoe the artist's experience of the week, at a tangent. One of the 2 'Large Whistle Jacket' paintings on unstretched canvas took part in the 'Art House Group Show' , 'Glass Ceiling', during the month of July 2008. Some of the 'Horses Tableaux' found a home in a restaurant local to the Art House, where Joyce's studio is located, for a few months. Others were shown in a small gallery in Canterbury during the summer and autumn months of 2008.
I set up a small exhibition of these smaller framed oils on canvass at my Studio F2, Arthouse, on the occasion of my cousin Mark Murphy's visit from Texas, in May 2014. They might not have gone very well in his home with his collection of ultra-realistic 2D artworks and 3D bronzes of cowboys and fine american breeds... He did enjoy visiting the 2 Tate Galleries with me though, fish and chips at the foot of Windsor castle, a soup in China Town...
I guess my horses are quite expressionist and convey feeling, emotion and energy, in a way which is not reminiscent to that of a photo camera's eye, or of paintings created in a more traditional mode.
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JOYCE'S ART : paintings'
