Joyce Zavorskas

I feel a close bond with the fragility of an ocean environment and pursue opportunities to memorialize beloved places. My recent oil paintings, monotypes and etchings examine ubiquitous quirks found in nature, and fix in time the face of the beloved before its demise. The build-up of paint on canvas, or ink imbedded intimately into the fibers of paper, connects the viewer to the harmony and wildness of nature.

Childhood summers in a small cottage in North Eastham with my parents and four siblings, and cousins, uncles and aunts and a grandfather who took us all fishing and clamming, embedded a love of nature deep in my soul. Activities revolved around weather and tides. Years later I still feel that magnetic pull to the beach, a visceral need to immortalize that magnificent view from a cliff overlooking a frothing ocean.

I am a painter and printmaker. I paint small oil studies to document the particular time, tide, wind and weather. I backpack my materials to a specific site and paint on linen looking directly at my subject matter. Painting on site is an immediate and intense response to what I see and feel and hear. I paint my familiar and it nurtures my soul. The site-specific monotypes are single reversed paintings created indoors  using thin layers of oil-base etching ink on a smooth acrylic plate, transferred to paper once only using a manual etching press. Glistening ink is imbedded forever into the fibers of the paper… memory of place fixed in time.