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Profile: Joan Hiller

Artist: Joan Hiller
Piece: There 3
Medium: Painting

Joan calls the series “There”—as in “so ___.” She painted the first one in the fall of 2011, coming on the heels of a string of commissioned work. More quickly followed. “When I was done [with a piece], I would say to myself, ‘There,’” she says with a slight lilt on that last word. I ask how she knew when was when. “It clicked,” she says, “it’s done.”

Prolific, Joan works at a clipped pace, especially evident in those early days of “There.” At times, she would finish three paintings in a single day. “Wake up and paint until four a.m.” She describes those days referring to this period as her “manic phase.” Her pace may have slowed somewhat since but not her stamina, and she is now approaching nearly thirty pieces in this series alone. Painter’s block, clearly, is not an issue. “Never with my own ideas.”

This ease and intuition has roots in a childhood where imagination offered Joan a welcome release. “I had horrible asthma as a kid,” she says. Treatment required that she sit very still while a tube pumped air from a box to a mask that she had to wear. To pass the time, she liked to write stories and illustrate them. She watched the PBS series The Secret City Adventures and paid close attention when Commander Mark taught his young viewers the basics of drawing. “I enjoyed doing it,” she says. “It came effortlessly.”

From this young age on, Joan painted, continuing in high school (“in the art club and all”) and college at the University of Houston where she entered as a dual journalism and painting major. Throughout, her focused stayed, for the most part, on figure paintings. She remembers “a couple of abstract periods, but they never took hold.”

Joan left college before graduating to take a music PR job in Chicago, and it was about this time when she met an early personal influence, the Seattle-based visual artist Derek Erdman. A painter himself, he encouraged Joan to show her work. (“An older brother,” she likeness their closeness, and she shows me the tattoo on her wrist of a lemon taken from one of his works.) Soon she had art hanging in galleries, bars, boutiques. Her profile started to rise along with the commissions requests.

Still working mostly with figures, Joan’s style grew increasingly abstract as she used “heavy lines, almost like paint-by-numbers but more textured.” She grew interested in the work and lives of Henry Darger and Alice Neel, two artists unknown (Darger) or ignored (Neel) during their creative years. “I read every book I could get my hands on,” she says. “Making art in a vacuum or without an audience—what do you get out of it?”

As the commission work piled up (“dictated by other people, usually portraits”) so did the desire to create art born of her own ideas and inspiration. And then came “There.”

“It suggests a place, an emotional state, a direction of a place you’re going, or someplace you’ve been.” Beyond finality, Joan is explaining the other reasons why the name holds such appeal for her. The parallels with her artistic process become clearer. “I didn’t know exactly what the series would turn into, so I kept calling it ‘There’ and adding a number.”

As the title suggests, “There 3” is the third in the series. It is also the first that required more than one sitting. It took three four-hour sessions with breaks between each to “take time away from it. It just wasn’t done.” Like the rest of the series, “There 3” is oil on paper. Joan laid a tarp on the ground in her studio (/apartment) and “painted on [my] knees.” She squeezed paint directly onto the paper, using a palette knife and squeegee (think car windshield) to swirl the colors; no brushes were harmed in the creation of this painting. The deep reds and harsh lines single aggression (“a lot of aggression”) but the cool greens offer a counterpoint of life, hope. “Trees,” she clarifies. She finished the piece in October 2011.

“No end in sight,” she Joan when I ask about the future of “There.” “I see my other work becoming more abstract, more mechanical techniques. More streaking, more addition and subtraction. Before was much flatter, calmer.” This direction has her excited. “I kind of don’t want to do anything else.”

Joan is the owner of Riot Act Media, a music PR firm, where she also works as a publicist.

See more of her work at JoanHiller.com.