Joyce Silverstone

Joyce Silverstone is a graduate of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, where she was awarded a Traveling Scholarship to continue her study in London and Paris as part SMFA’s 5th year program. Before moving to Western Massachusetts her art life was centered in NYC where she worked at the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. She is a Massachusetts Artist Fellowships recipient in both painting and video. Joyce has been exploring and refining ways of combining printmaking and painting for over 30 years. In addition, Joyce is a certified Rosen Method Bodywork Practitioner and Teacher, and teaches creative process to students of meditation and embodied awareness.

Joyce’s work is represented in corporate, private and public collections including MIT Museum, De Cordova Museum, Boston Public Library, Yale University Gallery of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Smith Art Museum, and the Hood Art Museum at Dartmouth College. Recent exhibitions include Central Booking Gallery (NYC, NY), A.P.E. Gallery (Northampton, MA), San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts (Havana, Cuba), Bromfield Gallery (Boston, MA), Lorg Fine Art Printmakers, (Galway, Ireland).

As a core faculty member at Zea Mays Printmaking, Joyce is dedicated to using and teaching sustainable and less toxic printmaking practices. She teaches and demonstrates printmaking at art centers nationally, and was selected to be an Akua Ink Demonstration Artist in 2014.

Artist Statement

I am drawn to monotype’s visual language, especially the openings that come from the unwilled and accidental. Over time, I discovered some of the traditional printmaking methods for describing space, using fades, transparency, texture, and linear marks to build, remove, and imply place and movement. Central to my vocabulary is drawing, and I appreciate how qualities of touch and presence are conveyed in transfer drawings. I am interested in exploring body metaphors, contained forms and openness, edges that are boundaries and connectors, and exploring my own attunement to forces of the natural world.

I like having many of pieces going at once, and having them up and around the studio so I can live with them for a while. When I see one that I can work back into -- where I can make some formal discoveries, if I make small shifts in composition, color, or shape, I know that one on the wall has something to do with the one way over on that table, so I like having the group around to inform each other.

For the prints represented here, I took my time to get the feel of the image by printing multiple plates: line plates, color plates, and plates that carry forms and textures. Each move in the printing process required me to reconsider the context of the images in relation to each other, as their chance interactions built with each additional running of plates through the press. I was on a search for the juxtapositions that felt distinctly true and right.