On the street where you live
Jody Joseph spent her summer painting houses in Dundas
“Painting outside is, for me, like being inside my painting,” says Jody Joseph. “I lose track of time. I’m not hungry. I spend hours standing, involved in an intense conversation with my motif, my painting, myself.”
Painting outdoors is what she did this summer. But instead of setting up her easel in a wood somewhere, she took to the streets of Dundas and painted portraits of houses. She’s done this before, but the houses keep calling to her. So do the people she encounters.
“I love talking with my Dundas neighbours, tradespeople, garbage men and passersby, and turning them on to painting,” she tells me.
Joseph is a well-established artist and art teacher who has been painting for more than 20 years. Her house paintings and some still lifes are on show in My Dundas Summer, an exhibition comprising about 40 sunny oils at Gallery on the Bay.
“I ask permission if I’m going to set up on private property,” Joseph says. “No one has ever said no. Residents and neighbours of all the houses I painted were all friendly and very interested in what I was doing. Many brought me water or snacks.”
In “Backyards,” a spacious foreground invites us in. Trees flank a shed that leads to houses in the back. Bright greens, oranges and yellows indicate the presence of sunlight.
“Although the fronts of the houses in that painting face a busy street, the deep wooded lots behind are like a private forest with no other houses blocking the view.”
Joseph’s style is barely representational. She reduces everything to loosely painted shapes. The front of the shed is made up of rectangles, a square and a triangle. The foliage of the trees consists of big smudged shapes, some rounded, others straight-edged.
The surface is textured from the way Joseph applies her paint, loose and layered.
In “Albert below Alma,” sinuous areas filled with coloured brush strokes lead us in on the left foreground. Steps encourage us to move into the trees and houses farther back. Joseph paints the steps as a series of short horizontals. The gardens are reduced to a variety of green shapes enlivened with bits of pink and orange. Such sketchiness and stylization convey nature’s dynamism. They also suggest an artist painting quickly to capture a particular moment.
Joseph’s barely representational style is balanced, however, by her approach; that is, she says she paints what she sees.
“Albert below Alma,” she says, “is very close to what I was looking at. I think I even counted the trees. Nothing is made up. At the same time, not every detail of the scene is in the painting. Some things are de-emphasized to make other things clearer.”
In “Off Sydenham,” a small pink house dominates the composition. Joseph surrounds the house with big dabs of green. Bits of brilliant blue enrich the sky.
“Painting on site can capture our binocular vision — the different things we see with each eye — the constant darting of our eyes, our feelings, the passage of time, the changing light,” she explains. “I hope my paintings evoke some of these sensations.”
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@the spec.com Special to The Hamilton Spectator