About

Joyce Polance is a painter based in Catskill, New York. She has presented two solo museum exhibitions at the Wausau Museum of Contemporary Art (Wisconsin) and the Dubuque Art Museum (Iowa), and her work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States. Her paintings are held in private and corporate collections nationally and internationally.

She is the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including six Chicago CAAP grants, a George Sugarman Foundation Grant, two Judith Dawn Memorial Grants, and a fellowship at the Spertus Institute in Chicago. She received her BFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology and attended Wesleyan University.

Her practice spans portraiture, the figure, and expressionist imagery, unified by an investigation of emotional intensity, gesture, and human connection. She may be contacted directly for the purchase of paintings.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

For many years, my paintings were driven by anxiety—by a need to destabilize the surface through destruction, reversal, and constant motion. Working between abstraction and representation, I often turned the canvas upside down and tore into what I had just made, searching for relief through chaos, color, and texture. Across these years, the human figure remained a constant presence in my work. In 2023, after moving from Chicago to Upstate New York, something shifted. Out of that change, a new series emerged: portraits of my therapist, painted entirely with my fingers.

In these works, I turn the gaze toward a male subject—not as an idealized figure, but as a real person marked by warmth, steadiness, and presence. As the patient, I reverse the traditional roles and observe the one who is usually unseen. Each painting reflects a different emotional register of the relationship as my perception of him changes over time.

Working with my hands allows me to experience the image through touch rather than distance. I build layers of oil paint and remove them with my fingernails, revealing what lies beneath—mirroring the slow excavation of therapy itself.

These portraits live at the edge of intimacy and vulnerability. They explore what it means to be seen, to project, and to trust—transforming therapy into a physical, tactile exchange that reflects both personal and universal dimensions of human connection.