Gordon Joy

Gordon Joy was born in Doncaster in 1948 and studied at Hull College of Art, then as a postgraduate at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.

In 1985 Joy’s paintings of British landscape were exhibited in Tokyo and he went on to produce a major sequence on the downlands of Wiltshire and Berkshire for the Ridgeway exhibition in Swindon.  This series features prominently in The Ridgeway:  Europe’s Oldest Road, published by Phaidon Press.

Since 1984 he has been represented by Francis Kyle Gallery, London, participating in many of the gallery’s theme exhibitions from The Lost Domain (1986) and Venezia Ancora (1987) to Paradise is here...Ten Painters in Mohgul and Rajput India (1989), Twelve Painters take the Pilgrim Road to Santiago de Compostela (1991), The Piero Trail (1994), Artists take to the Forest (1995), Cities and Water (1995), Roma (2003) and Lair of The Leopard: Twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily (2005).

Following an initial period when he specialised in landscape, Joy has developed an increasing interest in architecture, in particular where it betrays the influence of Islamic culture, after his first exposure to this in Venice in 1986.  In 1989 Joy made a prolonged visit to Saudi Arabia, exhibiting there early in 1990.  First one-man exhibition of paintings from three continents with Francis Kyle Gallery, 1991.

Since 1994 Joy has returned to landscape as a major theme, staying for some months on the north-west coast of Majorca.  He has also been rediscovering English landscape in East Anglia, in particular those areas of Suffolk where Constable and Gainsborough worked.

I give top marks to Gordon Joy’s architectural studies, small paintings in
acrylic on board which reproduce, with a miniature painter’s attention to
detail, the intricacy of Islamic architecture and its rich marble inlays.  They incorporate glimpses of gardens and sunlit foliage; he captures the quality of light with a clarity reminiscent of French painters working in Rome around 1830.

TAKEN FROM ‘THE INDEPENDENT’
CONTEMPORARY ART MARKET
By Geraldine Norman

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