About Joose

If I have one piece of advice, it's to "Do what you love!"  

Over a lifetime of scribbling, sketching, yearning to catch a likeness there have been moments when it all fell into place as well as those where nothing could possibly salvage it. Dispair? Rarely. Instead I became a top notch problem solver as well as part mystic. I took lessons here and there in order to have the technical tools that would allow me to achieve an image with a touch of magic. My process became a mix of analyzing what doesn't work along with what is the picture telling me to do. 

Like most artists I started as a youngster: drawing roses from the seed catalog, painting by numbers from a kit and marveling at the human form in the illustrations in Dantes' Inferno. A few art classes in a small rural High School in Northern California and I was designing the cover for the yearbook. As a Senior I entered a competition and received the Bank of America Award in Art. 

With such a promising start, I started college at Sacramento State with visions of being an Art major, but within 2 weeks realized I had no way to pay for the art materials required and everyone else seemed already acquainted with equipment and materials foreign to me, so I turned my back on art and switched to Philosophy and Speech Majors and became a school teacher . 

But once bitten by the art bug, few can survive a lifetime without succumbing to it. A few years into my teaching career I signed up for a watercolor class and was soon painting in the evenings after correcting my student's papers. Next I learned to cut glass and matting and frame my art in precut metal frames. Then as luck would have it my husband and I bought an art business and started Great Art & Frame near Tampa where I learned to do custom picture framing and paint in oils and acrylics. So for over 25 years I painted commissions and framed art for my customers. 

During that time, I joined the Tampa Regional Artists and started earning prizes in their art shows. Soon I earned a Best of Show for "Moon Magic" in the Regional Show, A First Place for "Majestic Thunder" and several more in community shows. Then I joined the Oil Painters of America where one of my paintings, "Elle", was juried into a national show where it sold for twice what I priced it at. Then both my mother and my husband fell ill and needed home care. So that left no extra time to pursue my art career since I also needed to run the frame shop. After they passed, I knew it was time for a new chapter, so I decided to move back home to California.

Now that I've retired and sold the business, so I can follow my own leanings and concentrate on honing my painting skills. My recent works are featured in their own collection while the others are sorted by subject: portraits, animals, florals, landscapes and general fine art. I hope you enjoy perusing the images and, of course, they are available for purchase.