HUMAN-EARTH CONNECTION: Artist Joy Kreves, shown in her studio, creates her own nature with both natural and man-made materials.

By Thomas Kelly

Joy Kreves’ art is interlaced with her surroundings. Her home is now a suburban gallery, showcasing her own and her friends’ works. She creates her own nature with both natural and man-made materials. She works in sculpture, painting, photography, mixed media, and poetry. Just when you think you know her work, she surprises us again.

How did you begin making art? What inspired you to go to art school?

I loved drawing as early as I can remember. As a preschooler, I remember drawing squiggles and curls, then running to ask my parents if I had written anything. If they found a word, I was thrilled! It seemed like magic that you could draw some lines, and other people could get a word or idea from them.

Probably around 4 or 5 years old, my sister and I were sitting on the floor drawing horses with crayons on paper. I was having a great time packing a bright red color onto my horse. It seemed like the heavier I applied the color, the more real the horse became. My sister looked over and said, “You can’t draw a red horse — horses aren’t red!” I looked over at her horse, a very correct brown. At that moment I realized the immense power of art — that you could make whatever you dreamed of, whether it existed in the “real” world or not. I had already done it! There was now a red horse in the world! This feeling of freedom and power hooked me on art.

In our family it was a given that we would go to college, and I got an art teaching scholarship at Illinois State University, which had some very young, avant garde art professors. I just ate it up. Well, not the teaching part so much as the studio part, as I never had the vocal cords to do classroom speaking all day long and was much too shy to take charge of a classroom. So, I got my undergraduate degree in art education with extra credits in ceramic art, and went on to graduate school
in studio art.

What connection does your art have with nature and the world around us?

I have never been an “outdoors” person, really. I appreciate the beauty and playfulness of the natural world, but it can also be terrifying. I think I’ve been inspired to use natural materials partly to come to terms with this aspect.

Early formative experiences include: my schoolteacher mother once almost died when her car broke down in an Illinois snowstorm. She walked the rest of the way home and collapsed. And that time our family was camping in Canada, and a grizzly bear was sniffing around the tents, so we all had to spend the night in a lodge. The time our gorgeous Persian cat summoned us to the garage where she promptly had kittens, immediately named by my sister and myself, but a couple of weeks later they were all bloodied and strewn about the garage by a tomcat. There was the trip to the Ozarks where we heard a panther’s spine-chilling scream pierce the night. Experiences like these surely explain the layer of darkness that creeps into my art. I consciously battle that with beauty or absurdity.

I have gone through series in which I incorporated things from nature into artworks; however, I eventually learned that all nature’s materials are ephemeral to an extent that I was not that happy with. It began to feel absurd that I was taking these ephemeral-by-nature things, like moss and leaves, and then trying to preserve them.

In ceramics I could take plants and impress them into the clay, forever preserved. But although I loved working in clay, I did not want to set up a ceramic studio in my home, so I turned to celluclay, which is a kind of paper clay that doesn’t need kiln firing. My first works in celluclay were my geode rocks. My husband was diagnosed with lung cancer that year, and I began that series as a meditation on gratitude for our relationship and all I had been given. The geode sculptures were also symbols of nature’s beautiful gifts to humans and other creatures. We are inseparable from the natural world because we are made up of the same materials as our surroundings.

What fight/struggle do you have regarding your art?

My art struggles have run the gamut of space, money, and time, but I have always known I was more fortunate than many artists. I have had more space than most of my friends in the area. I’ve had the whole downstairs of this ranch/bank house. I did have a supportive partner, who, although he didn’t usually understand what I was doing, was always interested in hearing about it. And although I would have liked to sell a bit more and to have taught more, I didn’t have to in order to create.

I think when you are a young artist you can’t help but dream about being discovered, especially if you live in New York City like I did. However, once I learned more about the established art world, I realized that I really did not want to be part of that, and that I had the most freedom doing whatever I liked without market pressures limiting my explorations. These days when censorship is rising, I believe I made the right choice to prioritize freedom of expression over all else. Freedom of expression is priceless.

What are you communicating with your art?

Well mostly, at least since 2010, I have been trying to express the human-earth connection. I have been interested in the strength of this connection, and it seems important that all people realize that we are not above the laws of nature, we are not at the top of some natural hierarchy in which we can afford to pillage the earth for resources and control everything. I try to let the element of chaos into my work instead of depicting an unrealistic world where everything is under human control.

Sculpture, installations, mixed media, photography, paintings. How do you decide which media and method for a specific idea?

Material often inspires a work. I love texture. I have pretty much given up on installations due to running out of space, but I enjoyed them the way you’d enjoy creating a symphony — the challenge of getting many parts to become something meaningful. Right now, I am doing more photography because I’m exploring the nature of water.

Who were some of your influences and inspirations?

So many! My college drawing teacher Ray George taught me how to draw space. Another, Ron Jackson, taught me that philosophy and art went hand in hand. I was enamored by Sandy Skoglund’s glowing installations, Robert Rauschenberg’s BED, and Laurie Anderson’s combination of visual, written, and performing art. But at NYU I studied botanical drawing, too, which I thought was profound.

Do you now have all the skills needed to make your art, or are you still learning new techniques?

I am still open to learning new techniques, but if I don’t have a way to do the technique in my own studio without buying expensive new equipment I don’t want to get too involved with it at this point.

Is it interesting to see the public’s reaction to your work?

Yes, always, especially children. I am always aware that their viewing of my work could potentially bring them that “red horse realization” of art as true freedom.

Have you seen your work evolve or change over the years?

Definitely. I think it took me a long time to find out that my interest was the human-earth relationship. Since then, I have explored the theme in lots of different mediums.

Where can we see your work?

I often exhibit in area art centers. I also curate occasional by invitation only art/poetry events in my home studio/gallery, Suburban Frontier. Anyone interested in being notified of these exhibitions can contact me through my website, joykreves.com.

What is on the horizon? What are you looking forward to?

I am continuing to write poetry and attend Delaware Valley Poets/US1 Poets workshops because I still have that interest in writing that people can get meaning from. I am also working on a piece for an upcoming “Dangerous Women” exhibition curated by Tricia Fagan that will be at Ellarslie Museum in Trenton this fall. A complication is that my entire studio recently flooded from a cracked water filter, so I will have no studio or kitchen for months. However, I am looking forward to continued explorations of the fascinating imagery that appears in my water photography. My hypothesis is that water is witness, so the images that appear are parts of history resurfacing — after all most of this world is water. This is the mystery I am currently studying. Sometimes art can show us truths that hide from the scrutiny of science.

To learn more, follow Joy Kreves Art Studio on Facebook and @joykrevesart on Instagram, or visit joykreves.com.