Joyce Watkins King
Joyce Watkins King is a native North Carolinian, born and raised in Oxford, NC. Raleigh has been her home since 1975 when she accepted a full scholarship to the College of Design at NC State University. She has devoted most of her professional life to work in marketing, graphic design, the arts, and development for nonprofit organizations. Since 1993 her designs have been recognized with 12 regional and 36 national design awards.
In addition to a B.A. Degree in Environmental Design in Visual Design/Product Design, she holds an M.S. Degree in Management, also from NC State and CFRE (Certified Fundraising Professional) licensing. Joyce has taken courses at Penland School in metalsmithing, photojournalism, printmaking, and mixed media painting.
During the past nine years Joyce has had 15 solo shows in North Carolina. Her work has been included in more than 100 local and regional juried group exhibitions, and two national exhibitions. Her work is represented in many private, corporate, and institutional collections in the Triangle area including Meredith College and SAS.
Until recently Joyce's media of choice have been acrylics, oils, and black and white photography, and her work has been largely representational. That changed in 2004 when she took a class from Clarence Morgan at the Penland School in mixed media painting. Since that time Joyce has been working in a variety of media creating mostly abstract compositions. She enjoys this more interactive style of "painting," exploring art making in its most basic forms - making marks and shapes in juxtaposition to one another, constantly reacting to what exists and what is evolving on the page: patterns, rhythms, colors, and shapes. Mixed media pieces allow her to explore the incorporation of found objects, photographs, commercial images, papers, wood veneers, and more into her compositions. She delights in creating something entirely new and beautiful from items that would typically be discarded, appealing to a desire to recycle things and give them new life. Many of her recent works involve a technique she developed of layering found images and then removing them, leaving partial imprints, much like a public display space for posters and flyers looks after many cycles of things being added and removed. The somewhat weathered effect implies the passage of time and layers of meaning.
Most recently Joyce has been incorporating a very ancient painting technique in her work: encaustic or hot beeswax and resin mixed with oil paint. This medium's unique flowing properties have allowed her to incorporate the element of controlled "chance" into her work, freeing her even more from the rules of objective painting.
"With abstract imagery there is no particular meaning assigned to the work. It is up to each individual viewer to search for their own meanings and connections in the work. I like that each person can see something different and respond to the painting from their own unique viewpoint, and they can see different things each time they view the work," says Joyce.