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

I work across figures and landscapes to examine psychological and relational states shaped by pressure, proximity, and instability. Although the work shifts between closely observed figuration and more disrupted painting, it is unified by an interest in how bodies and environments absorb strain and attempt to hold together.

My large-scale nude paintings are based on direct observation. The figures are rendered with control and specificity, allowing scale, posture, and closeness to carry the emotional weight. These bodies are not symbolic or idealized. They exist plainly and physically, negotiating intimacy, dependence, desire, and tension.

In my expressionist portrait and landscape work, I push more forcefully against representation. Each painting begins from a reference, but once the image is established, I stop looking at it. Through repeated cycles of building and erasing—thick paint, scraping, inversion, and distortion—the image shifts away from description. Faces distort and fragment; landscapes churn and compress, functioning less as people and places than as states shaped by experience.

The ongoing series of finger-painted portraits of my therapist brings these concerns into a direct relationship. Working entirely by hand removes the distance between artist and subject, replacing it with touch. Paint is built up and removed with fingers and fingernails, echoing the slow therapeutic process of uncovering. As the patient, I reverse the expected direction of observation, turning sustained attention toward the person whose job is to remain partially opaque.

Across all of the work, the painted surface becomes a record of testing and adjustment. Whether tightly controlled or repeatedly reworked, the paintings register uncertainty and emotional vulnerability across identity, connection, and place, resisting fixed meaning.