Working with Joy means to wake up and open up to an endless personal universe of images that nourish your soul. Encounters with this world can be exhilarating and frightening but always life affirming. Joy provides the space, materials, encouragement, and safety to enter this encounter with images from the interior. You can expect to be surprised, transformed and released. What is not known becomes known through the process of allowing an image to emerge. We try always to remember that the image is secondary to the process. This work is not about creating “art” but about taking a journey into our heart and soul and making an image that then speaks to that process and reveals something known or unknown.

How does this happen? Together we create a safe environment for our inner critic to be tricked into doing something other than protect us. While our critic is out of the room, the image that wants to be revealed comes through the simple process of applying a material to a surface and then following intuition to the next shape or color. We find ourselves in the moment, out of time and space until the piece is done.

Joy’s large and bright studio holds shelves and drawers of well-stocked paper and art materials organized in such a way that they are visible and easily accessible. You will feel as if someone has let you loose in an art supply store.

You need absolutely no experience with making art or using art materials. Joy and the materials will invite you to go at your individual pace and to discover this world in the way that meets your particular need.

Joy works with people individually and in groups. Working individually means that you and Joy spend some time talking and figuring out where the entry point is for your work with images. Then you work on your own with Joy available as needed. When you finish, we spend some time discussing your process and what happened internally.

Groups generally start with a short meditation and a “check-in” when individuals say a little about what is happening for them in the moment. This time helps to create a feeling of containment and assurance. It also often brings a subject or image to mind for that person or for another in the group. We then work together silently in the studio for a period of time. At the end we talk as a group about what happened for us during the “studio” time. We show our work not for criticism but for elucidation.

People working with Joy and in her studio say they experience a release, a freedom and a sense of their spirit moving and enlivening. They often say that the mystery of the creative process is revealed not through a rational explanation but through intuition and emotion. The greater mystery is felt through the small gesture of paint on paper.

Joy Vaughan
Long Cove Lane
PO Box 200 Tel. 207.644.8267
South Bristol, Maine 04568