*Te Uruti* (triptych), 2022, Oil on canvas, 2300 × 4500mm, Private Collection, NZ, featured during her debut exhibition with PAULNACHE Gallery, Gisborne, 2022

What painterly techniques can bring a landscape to life? And how much distance can the naked eye behold? Artist Joanna Abraham Joseph specialises in movement, and her paintings induce a sensation of range. Swathes of sky and water refigure themselves around dark, resilient cliffs. These expansive environments churn, they’re spirited.

*The Chase* (Diptych) 2023, Oil on canvas, 102 x 304cm. IMG X Thomas Teutenberg courtesy of the artist & PAULNACHE.

*Down From The Bar,* 2023, Oil pastel and pencil on wallpaper, 46 x 62cm, Private Collection, East Coast. IMG X Thomas P Teutenberg

Joanna sets out to combine the power of nature with the reverence of it. Her time spent in the water with her longboard, has opened up a majestic world of undulating waters set against watchful cliff faces stretching to the sky. This world and Joseph exist most days, on the Mahia peninsula. Here, a low hum resides in the gaps between waves and tides. Active, non-conforming, comforting and ever- lasting. Under heaving skies, immense waves barrel toward ancient, dark bedrock. What’s striking about these paintings is their physicality. Uninterrupted strokes required Joseph to walk the length of up to six metre long canvases.

*Molten Mountains* (Triptych) 2023, Oil on canvas, 230 (H) x 435cm (W). IMG X Thomas Teutenberg courtesy of the artist & PAULNACHE.

Images created by such actions demand a corresponding agility in its viewers.
These landscapes immerse us. The volume of paint; she applies oils lavishly!

Biography

Portrait of the artist in her Wairoa studio, standing in front of her large-scale (floor to ceiling) painting entitled ‘The Crest’. Photo: Wairoa, Hawkes Bay 2022.

Joanna graduated with a Diploma of Fine Arts from Otago School of Fine Art 1994. She has exhibited throughout the Otago region since 1995, and shown collections of works in Invercargill, Christchurch and in her hometown of Wellington, where she was born in 1971.

Prior to her representation in 2022, her paintings were largely portraiture based as a young mother, inspired to illustrate her whanau and extended whanau – their beliefs, place in environment – slices of domestic moments from a bi-cultural perspective.

Since that time she has chosen to reflect on aspects of environmental interest within depictions Joanna calls ‘land portraits.’ These portraits have also included national anthropological history reflecting conversations between natural worlds sharing continuous narratives that are in the moment.

Reviews include interviews on TV 1 and Radio New Zealand (under the name Joanna Tokona) as well as features in The Listener and Sunday Star Times.