Thorne has had four museum retrospectives, including two in the Dominican Republic, one in Puerto Rico, and one at the Berry Art Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, where the museum published a 55-page catalog of four decades of her work. She has also been the recipient of several prestigious grants, including the Prix de Rome, New York State and National Endowment awards, and two Pollock-Krasner awards.

Greta Berman: We were talking about how difficult it was to become known as a woman painter during the 1970s when you first started, and what I’m interested in for Persimmon Tree, because it’s a periodical featuring women 60 and over, is how you started, how difficult it was, and how that compares to current circumstances.

Joan Thorne: I was in the first consciousness-raising group in New York City, which was an offshoot of the Redstockings group in Boston; we were a group of about 20 young women, some of whom were art historians and some painters. The group included artists Joan Snyder and Pat Stier, as well as curator Marcia Tucker, who founded the New Museum—quite a roster of well-known women in the arts. One thing we discovered was that we were all afraid of power—we were all afraid of success—because our mothers gave us a double message, as many mothers have done with their girl children, not their boys. The double message was: (A) “When you grow up it’d be great if you got married and had babies and had a little career as a hobby” and (B)“You should make something of yourself, succeed—but don’t you dare!” So that was the conflicting message that my mother gave me. She saw that I was very artistic, and she convinced my father, who was a hand surgeon, to send me to the Little Red Schoolhouse because she saw that I was into painting, sculpture, ballet, modern dance, all kinds of creative activities that were fostered by the Little Red Schoolhouse.

GB: You feel that that influenced you to become an artist?

JT: I became a real artist in Little Red. I didn’t talk very much, so I made a lot of pictures, and they hung my pictures in the hallway. I thought I was doing something important because they would talk to me about the pictures; and when we had social studies, or any other non-art class and I was making pictures, they didn’t tell me to put my art things away.

GB: So that is where you became an artist, or where you became validated as an artist?

JT: Right. But we could go back further to before I could even walk. My father had these huge surgical books with beautiful, colorful renditions of the inside of the body: an arm cut open, a stomach cut open. Of course, I didn’t know what I was looking at, but when you see things like that when you’re very young, it has an impact on your brain. Much later, some people would come into my studio and look at my art and say “Oh, it’s abstract, but it reminds us of the human body,” and I would say, “Well, yeah, I guess I can’t get away from it.”

GB: That’s so interesting; you’re still influenced by those very early images that you saw!

JT: Yes, but not at all consciously.

GB: What’s wonderful, Joan, is that you’ve taken those subconscious images and made them into tangible creations that are beautiful, positive, and joyful.

JT: The human body is beautiful.

GB: It certainly can be. But looking at entrails and other interior components doesn’t appeal to most of us. Your work always intrigues me because of how many different sorts of pieces, shapes, and colors somehow come together—and they come together for me on different levels.  It’s as if you’re looking into space, and some shapes go way back, and some come forward; some are dark, and some are light. Tell me a little bit then about how you go about this.

Ionic, oil on canvas, 2023, 66” X 56.”

JT: What you’re talking about has a story; it’s about the depth in my painting. I deal with perspective in a whole different way because I’m an abstract artist. But there’s no such thing as abstraction or realism, because if you turn, let’s say, a Matisse painting upside down, it’s basically shapes in space.  Two of the greatest influences on my work were Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and a wonderful film called Orfeo by Jean Cocteau.  There’s a scene in Orfeo in which Orpheus, guided by another character, walks through a huge mirror and into Hades to reclaim Eurydice. To make a long story short, I’ve always had the feeling that painting is impossible; that’s why I paint.

GB: Because it’s impossible?

JT: Yes; and one of the ways it’s impossible – going back to Orfeo—is that I feel there’s a painting behind the painting behind the painting, into Infinity.

GB: Yes, I see that in your paintings.

JT: It’s similar to the idea some posit of other universes beyond our own universe. My friend, who would beg to differ with me because he’s a pure mathematician, says no, there’s probably an end.  I argue with him, and other mathematicians and scientists would argue with him as well. I’m reading a book now about Amelia Earhart, the famous woman aviator; she tried to do the impossible, and she died. I’m not dead, but I’ve spent my whole life trying to do the impossible. it’s hard to understand. In Buddhism, trying to grasp the concept of nothingness is the ultimate form of meditation. But then if you wrap your brain around it, it’s something, rather than nothing; so, you can’t really get there. On the other hand, you’re always there.

Chica Morada, oil on canvas, 2023, 69” x 60.”

GB: It’s paradoxical. Just as you said that it’s impossible to paint, and yet you’re painting all the time. Would you consider yourself a Buddhist or influenced by Buddhism?

JT: I am influenced by Buddhism, and I’ve traveled to many Buddhist countries. I’ve been to Southeast Asia six times, India twice, and I’m very interested in the Buddhist philosophy. However, I don’t believe in organized religion. Getting back to the Allegory of the Cave by Plato: people chained to the walls of the cave see only shadows projected by flickering fire. But they believe that those shadows are real. I believe that painting is a total illusion and that our lives are total illusions. Think about the ego, which causes wars and all kinds of terrible things: it is an illusion that we think we are something and that we’re going somewhere. The Western mind has latched onto the ego. As we speak, Trump is meeting with Putin [negotiating over Ukraine].  Both those men have huge egos, and they’re going to tell the world what we’re all supposed to be doing and thinking and whatever. When I paint, I’m not only involved with the idea of illusion, but I’m also involved with getting rid of my ego; that’s very Buddhist in a way. I also write poetry, through which I try to get beyond the materials of painting, because painting is such a material-driven art; you need paint; you need canvas. I feel that poetry is, in a way, a more direct form.

Inside Out, oil on canvas, 2025, 49”x59.”
This is a very recent painting.  Although it looks entirely different from Odyssey (see the images at the head of this article and on the home page), in both paintings the contrapuntal effects of sharp vs. round, of yellow/orange vs. blue and green and the purposely unfinished edges moving off into infinity reveal the sensibility of the artist.

GB: Tell me a bit about your poetry.

JT:  Two of my poems spring to mind: one is about the terrible pandemic, which is not a very happy poem. I got up at 3:00 in the morning when 800 people or more were dying in New York every day. They were on ventilators, so they couldn’t even see their loved ones to say goodbye. Poems are just given to me, like the paintings are given to me. I have another poem that I wrote recently about a wonderful birthday dinner that I had in a historic stone house:

The poems have nothing to do with my paintings. People asked me when I was much younger—I was writing then also—are you a painter or a poet? And I would say, well, why do I have to decide? Why can’t I do both?

GB: No reason. Americans want to put you in a box; not only do they want to put you in a box by artistic medium, but as a painter they want to put you in a box. What kind of painting do you do? Why do you do different kinds of paintings? And that brings me to another question.

You know my fascination with synesthesia, and you said that you are a synesthete. So, I’m wondering: I’ve dealt with many artists who are synesthetic, and they work very differently. Are there particular forms, shapes, colors, that come to you when you hear music?

JT: You know, synesthesia comes from the womb; embryos hear the swishing of the water right in the womb.

GB: So, all babies are synesthetes when they’re born, but little by little most of us lose those connections.

JT: My mother was born in Odessa, also the birthplace of my favorite painter, Mark Rothko. She had three brothers who were concert violinists, and they say that music runs in the family, but I never learned an instrument. I feel that I have musical instruments inside me, because for the first two and a half decades of making my paintings—the ‘70s [and] the ‘80s, mostly—I would hear them. I titled my paintings according to sounds that I heard from them.  I would look at my paintings when they were finished, and I would hear a sound.

GB: But it didn’t work the other way around? When you listened to music, would you see colors or shapes?

JT: When I listen to music—Stravinsky or any kind of music that I like—I see colors, but I don’t run over to the canvas and paint them. Often, I’ll listen to music while I paint: could be jazz, Latin music, or classical. But I don’t think the music affects what I paint.

Nazca, oil on canvas, 2022, 32” x 44.”

GB: Interesting, Joan.  I’ve spoken to many artists who are synesthetic, and some of them are exactly the opposite; they hear music, and they run to paint what they hear as fast as they can because they see it so clearly; others don’t do that at all. It’s also the case that some composers have based their work on colors that they hear, and that’s quite incredible. I’ve done a lot of work on this phenomenon; I’ve spent a large part of my life on the interface between music and the visual arts.

JT: It’s fascinating. I’ve heard that Messiaen, Stravinsky, and other composers have been very influenced by colors.

GB: Absolutely! Messiaen wrote at length about it. And Kandinsky is a prototypical synesthete; many of his works are based on the sounds that he saw.

JT: There’s another phenomenon, and it has to do with embryos. I did my first museum show in 1973 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. I was the first woman artist who was given a one-person show there. I paint intuitively; my work comes largely from my subconscious, and sometimes I learn many decades later what the painting was about, and where it came from. Much later, I was looking at the paintings I did for that show, and all of a sudden it dawned on me: when I was born, and I popped out, I saw this incredible, blinding light.  And all of those paintings are like stained canvases, so they’re totally almost white; so I began to believe that that’s where those came from. One major painting, Amphra, that I made after I did the Corcoran series, came from a dream that I had. In this dream, I was living in a palace in Persia, and I was speaking Persian—though I don’t even know how to say hello in Persian. In the dream there was a huge painting on the wall, and when I woke up. I ran to my drawing pad, drew that dream painting, and called it Amphra. It became huge, about eight feet tall. In that painting, which I made in 1972, is all the language that I’ve used in all of my work since then. That’s so profound to me.

Amphra, oil on canvas, 1973, 102” x 71.”

GB: We change externally; we grow older. But our inner self—who we are, our soul—is unchanging, though even our inner self acquires different aspects. Speaking of which, do you ever simply sketch the woods, landscapes, still lives?

JT: In undergraduate school—I went to New York University—they told me I could major in art, but I had to take a Bachelor of Science degree; this did not make any sense to me. But now I don’t regret it. I took biology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and physics. I’m still working off of ideas that I learned in those courses. In physics, for example, I learned that if you look at a wall nothing is fixed; the molecules composing it are all in motion. So, I have this Eastern idea of life—that everything is in a state of flux; nothing is permanent. And my paintings reveal that.

Naga, oil on canvas, 2022, 38”x 46.”

GB: I understand what you’re saying, and I see that in many of your paintings. You and I were photographed with your large oil painting Odyssey [see the photo at the head of this article] which has all of those qualities. So, what else in terms of sketches?

JT:  I love nature. As an undergraduate I painted mostly from human models, and I had a teacher who didn’t care for me.  He would come over with a big stick that he smacked on the floor so hard it scared me. And he would say “what is this leg flying off the canvas?” and “What is this arm flying off the canvas? You need to paint the whole figure on the canvas!” But I never did that. So, I was becoming an abstract painter in undergraduate school, and then I chose to go to Hunter because that was the only place where you could make abstract paintings. Tony

Smith, my thesis advisor, was a good friend of Mark Rothko, and he was part of the famous New York Artists Club [a gathering place for abstract artists]. Tony championed my work, and he allowed me to do my paintings instead of writing a thesis, but he knew that my favorite painter was Rothko. One day, Tony said to me, “Here’s Rothko’s phone number; why don’t you call him and visit his studio?” So, I called him, and he set up a date for me to visit his studio. But a week before I was supposed to go, he committed suicide. I was so upset. I went to Venice because a museum there was having a Rothko memorial exhibition. There were rooms and rooms of his paintings, including one room of black and white. I never knew that he painted black and white…this was the last series of paintings that he did; he painted his own death. I sat there and cried. Then Tony Smith said something very strange to me: he said, “Joan, you’re about to graduate. I know you’re going to continue your paintings, and you’re lucky that you’re a woman.” I asked why; and he said, “Because women are the closest to their intuition; to be a great artist you have to be close to your intuition. Men have to struggle very hard to get to that place.” It’s stuck in my brain forever. I think that’s true, but everyone would be down on me when I was making these early wild paintings because I was following my intuition, and all these other guys were doing different things on their canvases and giving reasons why they did.

GB: People like to pigeonhole and put things in their places.

JT: You were supposed to have a male brain and have a style. I remember I had a couple of shows at the Willard Gallery, sold some work, and a collector came up to me and asked, “What are you going to paint next year? What are you going to show next year?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know.” He said, “I hope you paint the same thing,” and I said, “Why would I? That would be so boring.”

GB: He wanted similar work for the investment benefits.

Valparaiso, oil on canvas, 2022, 56” x 66.”

JT: Right. That’s how Americans think; they’re materialistic, and that’s partially what’s destroying our country; the government treats people like objects. Anyway, to get back to sketching and my love of nature: I have sketched from nature; I’ve done watercolors from nature. I took a trip to Ireland and met a well-known artist. She invited me to her home, and we went on a drawing trip, looking for the ancient ring forts. I have a whole sketchbook of those drawings. I have other sketchbooks like that. I also love tracing paper because images in my paintings often come from what I call skeletons.

GB:  Tell me about the skeletons.

JT: I like tracing paper because you can put one image down over another and move it around. You get layers, and you don’t have to erase things; you can just move things around, and redraw them, which I do at home in my studio. I have portfolios full of tracing paper. I feel sorry for the person who’ll be going through all my tracing-paper skeletons after I die.

GB: Do you then use these pieces of tracing paper to make a painting?

JT: Sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Did you ever read the wonderful book Black Elk Speaks?  Black Elk, a shaman, relied on his visions to guide his people on when to plant, when to go to war. I have visions, sometimes—just sitting somewhere—of an image, and then I’ll go to draw it; and then I’ll go to paint it. So, I feel that, like a shaman, I receive my paintings from another source, and my poems, as well. Someone once asked Bob Dylan about his basement tapes: “Where do you get your songs?” and he said, “I don’t get them; they’re just given to me, and I’m just a medium.” That’s exactly how I’ve always felt all of my life.

GB: That’s how William Blake felt; he said his poems and his pictures were dictated to him from above.

JT: I agree with that—and also with Rimbaud, who is one of my favorite writers because he also believed in chance and change. I don’t know if he ever said it, but I think his writing came from a source that’s kind of given to you. And that’s true of a lot of the French Symbolists.

GB: I did a lot of work on French Symbolism; I wrote my master’s thesis on Odilon Redon. That actually was what got me into art history in the first place. I fell in love with Redon.

JT: Oh, he’s incredible!  I love his work.  As to my own work: I was a road blazer for women; I’ve been in two Whitney biennials: the first one had three women; the second one fifteen. As I mentioned before, I was the first woman to have a one-person show at the Corcoran in Washington, and then I went to a gala opening this past year at Moore College of Art. They showed 81 women in 1974, when it was “Oh my God you’re showing women!” and it was—and still is—the only college art school only for women. Elaine DeKooning, Joan Mitchell, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson—all were among the women who were in that 1974 show, and it was very scandalous.  In 1979, Barbara Rose at the Grey Art Gallery put together another scandalous exhibition previewing the 1980s.

GB:  How does your work today reflect what you did earlier, and how do you experience being a woman artist over 60 today? After all, this magazine was founded because women of a certain age tend to be overlooked, and not thought to be creative anymore. Yet as I’ve told you, I think your work has grown, rather than diminished. Also: what would you like to be remembered for the most?

JT: For my unique revolutionary vision of painting using color, light, and space.

Voyager, oil painting on canvas, 2023, 66” x 65.”

GB: And how has your work changed over the years?

JT: That question could lead to another lifetime of conversation because I’m evolving physically and mentally all the time, every day, every hour, every minute, and so my work is evolving too.

GB:  That’s great, and admirable. It’s not true of a number of artists.

JT: Oh, tell me about it. Some people find a formula, stick to it, and never change.

GB: I think a really good way to sum things up is to say, “Joan evolving; Joan changing. Thank you. You’re an inspiration. And, by the way, you always look like your paintings!

JT: it’s funny you say that. I was out with a friend last week, wearing a black blouse, and he said to me “You’re wearing black! I’ve always seen you in lots of color!”  But under that black blouse I was wearing an orange shirt.

Conversation with Joan Thorne: An Artist Featured in American Painting: The Eighties
Cincinnati Art Museum, August 27, 2021:

One Foot in the Grave

The Other on the Treadmill

Reflections from Over the Hill

by Mary Donaldson-Evans

    Unflinchingly honest, this collection of anecdotes treats the challenges of aging with clarity and wit. Here, the losses are diluted with laughter, the shiver gives way to a shrug, the OMG to LOL. Readers weary of the “how to” books that promise to reverse the aging process will welcome the dark humor of a self-described narcissist preoccupied with her mortality. From fears of dementia to hearing loss, cosmetic procedures to breast cancer, joint replacement, and heart surgery, the octogenarian author mines the comic potential of her humbling experience of the later years. The witty and sometimes poignant essays in this collection may not silence the ticking of the clock or slow the falling sand of the hourglass, but they are bound to resonate with readers from middle age and beyond. “A work that is moving, honest, funny and human.” — Bob Mitchell, best-selling author of 13 books Available from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble. Find out more about the author and the book at marydonaldson-evans.com

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