Living in Color

Artist JoAnn Smith opens the doors to the joyous world of whimsy she has painted into life.

By John O’Hern

JoAnn Smith lives out in the country in the southern Finger Lakes of New York, down a half-mile drive which she admits is “fun in winter.” She has no neighbors, she says, “but I have deer, turkeys, grouse and beautiful birds to keep me company.”

Her 1859 farmhouse is surrounded by colorful gardens (she is a Cornell Cooperative Extension Master Gardner). When the opportunity arose, she began to paint the all-white interior of her home “to make it feel like summer in wintertime. It’s like living in one of my artworks—a very nesting feeling.”

Celebration of Spring, acrylic on wood

Her artworks are colorful, fanciful images of fruits and trees painted on canvas or panels as well as on found objects. Eventually her home had more than her artwork. It now has painted walls, ceilings and floors as well as painted floor cloths—a popular craft in the 18th and 19th centuries and completely in keeping with her old farmhouse. For her wall art she built and painted frames out of materials she found at rummage sales.

I first saw JoAnn’s wall art and painted furniture in a local gallery. In a long cold winter, it brightened my spirit and made me smile. That’s a good response to a work of art.

A colorful corner in the artist’s home.

When I saw what she had begun doing in her home, I thought of Charleston, a farmhouse down a long farm track in the south of England. It was a place the Charleston Trust explains, that attracted “the 20th century’s most radical artists, writers and thinkers known collectively as the Bloomsbury group. It is where they lived out their progressive social and artistic ideals.”

In 1916, the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved there. The trust notes, “Almost as soon as they moved in, Bell and Grant began to paint every surface in the farmhouse, transforming it into a living, breathing work of art.” Among its frequent visitors and often residents were members of the Bloomsbury group such as Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster and their associated friends T.S. Eliot, the economist John Maynard Keynes and the composer Benjamin Britten.

A corner in the artist’s living room with painted furniture, ceiling, floor and walls and a painted floor cloth.

JoAnn graduated from Elmira College and received her MFA from Pratt Institute where she became inspired by the work of abstract expressionist and color field painter Helen Frankenthaler. “I loved her colors,” she says. “Her paintings are like looking at air. They envelop your being.”

Alluring Artichoke, acrylic on canvas

She continues, “In graduate school I learned to paint. We had to produce work that was new. We had to experiment. I learned that you can change any way you want as long as it’s you and represents your own thoughts and ideas. Inspirations are different and your thoughts and ideas change over time. I look for more challenges, something different. When I started painting lamps I began thinking of sculpture, for instance.”

A wall in the artist’s dining room

Riverview, wall sculpture, acrylic on wood

She lives quietly in her colorful home but has been active in the community as a muralist and a teacher. She worked as a freelance designer for World Kitchen, was one of the ARTS Council of the Southern Finger Lakes’ Millennium Billboard Artists and was the Mural Artist in Residence for the Arts Council. Her murals grace many area schools where she worked with students of many grade levels both on the murals and creating their own decorative floor cloths.

Five Muses, acrylic on wood, and the artist’s collections in her dining room.

Her painting Sparky and the Redwinged Blackbird, depicts a well-remembered border collie who loved to watch the birds. Border collies are black and white—a combination that doesn’t live on her palette. He appears in purple and blue surrounded by colorful floral and geometric borders inspired by medieval illuminated prayer books. Ancient mosaic floors and the interwoven patterns of the 9th-century Book of Kells with its “beautiful twisted designs” are further inspirations. She admires the way the illustrators integrated myriad shapes. “It all goes together,” she observes.

Apples, acrylic on panel

The colors of Sparky are in the family of her favorite colors. Turquoise blue is, perhaps, at the top. “Yellows, pinks, I love every color,” she says. “I’ve even learned to like orange. Turquoise makes me feel very happy. When I think of turquoise I think of water, lakes, the colors from my garden or a sky I’ve seen, especially the sky in early spring. It makes the room feel alive. The chair in the living room has a teal velvet seat. I had to learn to do upholstery for that.” The chair sits on a floor cloth depicting a koi pond with fish and water lilies.

A chair painted in the artist’s favorite colors on a painted floor cloth.

The trees on her long driveway are also inspirations in works such as Celebration of Spring, Five Muses and Riverview. “My trees don’t look like normal trees,” she comments. “They’re interpretations and fun to do.” They’re inspired in part by the magical trees of artist Charles Burchfield.

Sparky and the Redwinged Blackbird, acrylic on panel

Burchfield wrote, “As an artist grows older, he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult, as he had when a child.”

JoAnn lives in her artwork, continually inspired by the wonders of nature that she has cherished throughout her life. —