Brooklyn-born abstract painter Joan Gold received her art education at the Cooper Union and the Brooklyn Museum in New York City, and at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Caracas, Venezuela. In 1955 she was awarded a U.S. State Department fellowship to paint and study in Venezuela, where she married and raised her four children. She retired as Associate Professor from the Universidad Metropolitana, Caracas, and was awarded a medal for her service to the country as an educator. In 1990 she received a Yaddo Fellowship in Saratoga Springs, New York. 

She has had solo exhibitions at the Galleria Arte Vigente in Caracas, the Lisa Harris Gallery in Seattle, the Himovitz Gallery in Sacramento, and the Atlee Gallery in Eureka. Her paintings have been shown at the California Museum of Art in Santa Rosa, and the gallery of The Cooper Union in New York City.

Gold's work is represented in public, corporate and private collections in the U.S. and abroad, including those of G.E. Corporation, Continental Cablevision, Massachusetts General Hospital, U.S. Air, Bill and Melinda Gates, the U.S. Embassy in Uganda, and the Morris Graves Museum and Saint Joseph Hospital in Eureka. She has lived and worked in Humboldt County, California since returning to the U.S. in 1979.

STATEMENT
The focus of my work is luminous color. I paint on paper which I assemble into paintings by composing the panels into groups and adhering them to canvas or board. I work with paintings in series; what I want to make visual happens best when a number of pieces come together unified by a single vision. Recent work, reproduced here, integrates traditional painting techniques and imagery enhanced by modern technology.

I arrived gradually at an abstract and minimal format as the most effective way to present the color and paint application which are my primary interests. I employ a variety of media and processes to achieve color that is rich and complex. Acrylic paint and collage are basic, as are, to a lesser degree, pastel, oil pastel, graphite, colored pencil and digital printing. Important aspects of the process are glazing with transparent paint layers and underpainting, both techniques that date from the fifteenth century. A few years ago I started incorporating "found" materials, such as wallpaper and other commercially printed papers into my paintings. Soon after that, I started making my own collage materials which greatly enriched the operation and led me to the variety of materials I use today.

RESUMÉ
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photograph by sabbatini fotografia