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an interview with Joyce Dibona
colors converging on a woman holding a clay bowl. It was of thick, sturdy 12- to 14-ounce canvas, coated with a protective lacquer. Like many of the paintings lined three-and-four rows deep along the walls, it was a beautiful confluence of abstract textures, patterns and ideas positioned among intense, vivid, sometimes sharply defined portraitures, landscapes, and still lives. “I started as an abstract expressionist, with no preconceived ideas. Lately, things are becoming real physical and focused, incorporating guidelines of ‘conventional’ painting but retaining the element of free play.” We sat down on a couch; Joyce perched gracefully on the table, facing us. “As I mature, I tend to see life in two ways: ‘all is vanity’ and ‘all is mystery.’ I figure I spent the first half of it exploring aspects of the vanity,” she cracked a wry smile, “while the mysterious tagged along. And now I can explore the mystery, or what’s left of it.” Steve asked, “Is that what motivates your art?” “Exploring the mystery: that’s ... well, to me, now, the mystery is more readily available. It seems like, in Western society, we need to name, and then we know what it is, and that’s the end of it. I hope to point to another way of being conscious in the world, another way that can alter the course of the world. By that, I mean we’re not just here to entertain ourselves, and though we’re here to pursue happiness (not at another’s expense), there’s a way to not be subject to the petty desires that human beings have. It’s a freer, more wide-open world. Just as valid, more humane, more conscious.” She stopped, and thought for a while. Steve snapped off another photo. “When I first started doing this, I thought I wouldn’t have to talk about the work. ‘The work speaks for itself.’ But as I did talk about it, it helped me grow and kept me focused enough to point to that which normally can’t be named.” Looking around at her pieces, this certainly sounded right to me. I added, “We name things, and then we know what they are. But your artwork is a lot more fluid than that, more pointing rather than nailing down in concrete terms.” “That is very much along the lines of what I think of my work. I think that that’s what I point to: some of these paintings, “ she searched the walls of the room, “are worlds that actually have occurred to me. Whether in a conscious state, whether in a dream state, I can go through painting by painting and say, ‘Hey, that actually happened.’ It can be shamanistic: ‘This is what it means in that other world.’ It can be mystic, it could have different connotations.” She motioned at a painting of a woman with a cluster of red flowers in one arm, crimson petals blowing off in the direction of her gaze, her other hand to her chest. “That,”she indicated, “is a concept. That one’s called Wisdom Fleeing. That is, in times of war and horror, the first thing to leave is wisdom. And as Wisdom leaves, she leaves behind some of her petals for those that are inclined to pick them up. Then we try to repair the damage done and stop the insanity.” “More of a direct metaphor, instead of pointing in the general direction?” I asked. “Right, while Omen,” directing us to a canvas of a child running down a curved road, flanked by a sortie of raven-like birds, “really had to do with the time before the death of my father. I was going to go home ... things were bad, and I went to run, and a flock of crows followed me. They flew around me, some would get ahead of me, then fly further on as I got up to them ... and they literally followed me up the hill. “In a lot of indigenous cultures, crows represent the passing of the soul. Now, not with black magic and all those weird connotations, but historically — in a lot of Native-American cultures, and other cultures throughout the world. Well, I couldn’t help but note this. I was like, ‘Nobody’s going to actually believe this happened,’ but I can paint it. And a hundred years from now, people will look at that, and they’ll have their own ideas about what that painting means. And in one way, I think that’s the point: Their own ideas are going to be their other side that sees it and interprets it however they do.” |
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