BIOGRAPHY
Joy Lynn Davis is a painter based in Santa Barbara. She was recently awarded a fellowship from the Warhol Foundation to be an Artist in Residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute. She received her BA from UC Santa Barbara in 2002, where she focused on painting and digital art. In addition, she has studied the Tibetan and Nepali languages, Himalayan art history and religions, as well as traditional thangka painting techniques taught by master thangka painters in Nepal and in California. Her acrylic and gold leaf paintings on silk are a combination of photo-realism and traditional Nepali and Tibetan motifs and styles, often juxtaposing the sacred imagery of traditional Buddhist thangka paintings with the mundane details of modern everyday life in the region. Her current series of paintings is the culmination of travels, interviews, photography, and art surveys conducted in Asia over the last six years. She also paints murals and has recently taken up street-painting in the i Madonnari tradition.

RESUME

ARTIST STATEMENT
My recent series of acrylic and gold leaf paintings on silk are a combination of photo-realism and traditional Nepali and Tibetan themes and styles, often juxtaposing the sacred imagery of traditional Buddhist thangka paintings with the mundane details of modern everyday life in the region. I paint people life-size directly from photographs, surrounding them with traditional motifs from Buddhist iconography - stylized clouds, halos, lotus thrones and temples – revealing narratives around the portraits. Although I am inspired by Buddhist imagery, I do not paint deities, nor do I portray a fabled, romantic, and timeless Shangri-La. Nepal, Tibet, and India: these are places undergoing transition. Motorcycles stand gleaming, parked beneath a 14th century Nepali temple in “Motorcycles at Changu Narayan Temple”. “Refugees Remembering Kailash” depicts an older Tibetan couple separated from the memory of their homeland by the barbed wire fence of their refugee camp in Nepal. In “Ama Sleeping” a Nepali mother sleeps outside on the clay porch, as is traditionally expected of her during menstruation; however, I elevate her and her straw mat off of the ground, above a scene of chickens and sandals, onto a lotus throne common in representations of the Buddha.