Joan Nelson

Joan Nelson is a visual artist who lives and works in upstate New York. For over three decades, Nelson has been making "epic and theatrical landscape paintings," borrowing from art history and re-presenting iconic vistas from the Fine Art lexicon including those of the Hudson River and Mount Hood. Joan Nelson spent her youth in St. Louis, Missouri, and "emerged from the East Village in the mid-‘80s at the forefront of a landscape revival that blurred the line between romance and irony.” Now, as then, Nelson paints small paintings on thick pieces of wood using a variety of materials such as oil paint and glitter, often combined with wax. She is well known for incorporating multiple pictorial landscape traditions in her vistas, combining fragments of paintings by other artists including those of artists: Hergé, who illustrated Tintin, Albrecht Altdorfer, Albert Bierstadt, Edward Hicks, Caspar David Friedrich, and George Caleb Bingham. This "referential vocabulary" demonstrates that Nelson's "landscape painting is not about the imitation of nature, or verisimilitude, but about art.” Occupying a unique place in the long history of landscape painting, Nelson "speaks to the experience of nature and the complexity of its representation across time and place... one that is distinctly female and revisionist." Her work has been described as "apocalyptic, with critics uncertain whether she is showing us an end or a potential beginning." Read more from Wikipedia →