Profile

Years of outdoor landscape painting and figure drawing have given Joyce McCarten a rich painting vocabulary in which she uses to develop her abstract and representational work. Through observation, interpretation, experimentation and pure imagination, she takes the familiar and alters it until it reflects her artistic vision. Rhythm and movement, structure and spatial and color relationships are the formal issues that engage and challenge her.

McCarten is an award-winning artist whose work is in private and public collections in the U.S., Europe and South Africa. She has painted for 20 years and has taught adult students for 13 years at The Art League School in Alexandria, Virginia. In the last few years, she has painted and taught in China, South Africa, Italy, Morocco and Rwanda, as well as in her favorite landscape, Montana.

McCarten’s paintings are her personal response to the unique places she has been called for teaching and ministry. Wherever she goes, she takes along her easel and paints small field studies of the sights and rhythms she sees. When she returns to the studio, she uses all of her training as a fine artist, her imagination and her ability to surprise herself to take the familiar and alter it to reflect her vision. This is her way of creating.