January 2018 – The Art of Joy A. McGugan

I’ve written about my dad before and his raw, natural talent. He was a huge influence on my own art and was one of my greatest supporters. During the past year I have discovered photos and articles about him and even sketches I had never seen before. It is always a joy to discover these little gems and I hope you enjoy them.

The latest discoveries were a photo and article from the local paper about Dad and other artists being chosen to exhibit at the World’s Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. This was in 1982 and I found it in a photo album.

The sketch was from a file of papers that evidently had been saved from his desk at work (as a manager for a financial company). They usually began as notes of a car that was to be financed and evolved into ideas for sculptures. From left brain to right brain on a single sheet of paper!

Where are the horse’s legs? Who knows, the horse never was never finished for some reason although it was used in a photograph of the current grand kids at that time. Below that a pic from this past Christmas with the latest Great-Grand, enjoying his time on the horse!

In the hustle and bustle of the holiday season furniture was rearranged to make way for our beautiful live and traditionally tall tree. Artworks were also rearranged to make place for the decor (and frankly to make room at the dining room table!). Then things calm down (it was eerily quite and lonely when my loved ones left town!) and the post-holiday cleaning and organizing begin.

Let me state here that there was very little PRE-holiday cleaning but there were valid reasons for that. Then there’s the procrastination factor. And the it-was-just-a-busy-time factor. A poor excuse is better than none, right?

Anyway, I noticed two works of mine that had been absent-mindedly placed together. Oddly enough they share a common theme. One is an oil pastel painting of a friend’s daughter’s hands holding a broken bird egg. The other is an assemblage of my zentangled eggs and other objects.

This got me thinking about themes in an artist’s body of work. I am currently working on a series of portraits of friends and family that show a variety of emotions, so there’s a theme. They are/will be drawn and painted, as per my favorite media. But the egg assemblages are a completely new medium for me, originally the solution to an overabundance of drawn on eggs. Creating them almost made me feel as if I were two different artists because they are so removed from the 2-d work, I even made separate Instagram and Facebook pages for them. But now there is a connection, although I’m not planning on creating more egg paintings just to justify that (come to think of it, I DO have another egg painting, lol!).

Comments welcome!