Featured Artist Joyce Kubat

Artist Joyce Kubat’s art is focused on the human figure, in all its pathos, rawness and uneasy beauty. View more of her art by visiting her website.

 

 

I received a BS in psychology from Michigan State University. During my senior year I took an art class and was hooked. After graduation I moved to New York and studied art at Brooklyn College and The Art Students League of New York. Throughout my career, my art focuses on the psychological aspect of human behavior.

 

 

In these modern times, I believe an artist has to be fearless, to push past barriers, to get angry enough with oneself to reject the ordinary, and to say something real.

 

 

I do feel that if you go deep enough within oneself to draw out real substance, you will do singular work. How could it not? It is by so doing that I feel I reached an internal vision as unique to me as a fingerprint.

 

 

The human figure has always been my focus, and over the years it’s become a psychological focus. By incessantly reworking my drawings, little by little, something unknown surfaced. Intimacy and psychological intensity surfaced. And I grabbed onto that like bees to honey. The rawness surprised me, a personal discovery that I welcomed and allowed, even if uncomfortable.

 

 

Included here are my small PINK INKS. They began in 2003 when I playfully drew a clothesline and hung body parts from it. It was my way of breaking away from the academic approach of analyzing what I was seeing to something personal. I could play and let anything happen.

 

 

Nothing was right or wrong. Some were just better because they said more on the paper. But that was a discovery after the fact. They are joyful, poignant moments, often funny, often off-putting, and they continue to this day.

 

 

My highly pigmented, acrylic based ink is a red earth color, like a life force or blood, raw and visceral. One cannot help but associate it physically and emotionally to the human body and to oneself. It is my hope that the work relates in some way to the universal humanity common to all of us.

 

 

I appreciate the photography of Diane Arbus. Although uncomfortable, she grants her subjects a sort of dignity, even though they are marginal characters in society.

 

 

Even the “ugly or uneasy” is beautiful when seen through compassionate, nonjudgemental eyes. Her work is direct, unmasked, instinctive, raw. Her psychological honesty gives me permission to include that quality in my work.

 

 

It is all about psychological substance.

 

Artist Joyce Kubat invites you to follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

 

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