ABOUT JOELLE STEELE

Joelle defines herself as a creative person, and she expresses her creativity in a variety of media. She is skilled in pencil and charcoal, pen and ink, watercolor, oils, and acrylics, preferring the latter as her primary medium. Joelle has an artistic ancestry and had an art-influenced childhood. She began painting at the age of 4. Her work was selected for inclusion in nine student art exhibitions before she graduated from high school, and she has since participated in many arts and crafts shows, mostly in California where she lived until 2005. Joelle also creates occasional commissioned works and has produced several collections of clip art. Her first job was as an illustrator and copywriter for an advertising agency while she was in college, after which she was a creative director for a book publisher and later a landscape and floral designer. She became self-employed as a creative services provider and periodicals publisher in 1983 and took her business to the World Wide Web in 1994, where it has been ever since. When she isn't painting, Joelle digitally restores antique and damaged photographs and teaches all-day Saturday classes at local colleges, including ones on the business aspects of making a living as an artist and on starting a Web site for your small business. She has a degree in Language Arts (a double major in English and Linguistics) and writes books, articles, short stories, poetry, legal documents, and Web pages.

Some previously-published interviews and articles about Joelle are available in the press room, and you can also read her artist's statement and resume and learn about her tools and techniques. The following is an autobiography of Joelle's life as an artist.

ARTISTICALLY INCLINED

by Joelle Steele

I was born artistically inclined. And I definitely got that "creative" gene from my family. Long before I arrived on this planet, and up to this very day, there have been many artists, writers, and musicians going back generations on my mother's side of the family. Among these many well-known Swedish-Finn creatives are my distant cousins: Tapio Wirkkala, the 20th-century designer best known for his extensive Iittala glassware collections and for his numerous awards, such as the one at the 1951 Milan Triennale that put Finland on the map design-wise; Johan Ludvig Runeberg, the 19th-century Finnish national poet who wrote the lyrics to the Finnish national anthem and for whom a holiday and the fraternal Order of Runeberg are both named; and Ray Dolby, the 20th-century inventor of the Dolby Digital Surround Sound used in movie theaters around the world. Also sharing my family tree are Bo Aurén, the 20th century artist/painter; Eric Cainberg, the 18th century sculptor; Alexander Slotte, the 19th/20th-century poet; Johan Nilsson Bastubacka Backman, the 18th century church artist of murals and altar paintings; Kreeta Haapasalo, the 19th-century folk singer; and Sonja Biskop (Bishop), the 21st-century pop singer/songwriter.

I'm certainly not famous, but I have spent my entire life making art, writing, and working at a wide variety of creative pursuits, and I can't begin to imagine living my life any other way. Art was and is always foremost on my list of the most important and joyful things to do in this life. I like to look at art, read about art, collect art, and make art — to paint in particular.

I grew up in California, in San Francisco and Monterey. My earliest art-related memories date to the age of 3. My father had a model railroad layout in the back of our garage, and my mother and I used to sit at the kitchen table and paint little buildings and fences, and make trees and other things for that miniature world. I also remember sitting with my mother at a table in the living room on a very rainy day with a tin of watercolors and a glass of water, each with a brush in hand. I was about 4 at the time, and we often painted together like this. I also started drawing and painting on my own at that age.

When I was in second grade, I broke my left wrist when I played on a jungle-gym designed for bigger kids. I was left-handed, so this meant I had to use my right hand for everything, and that is when I first discovered that I could, among other things, draw and paint equally well with either hand, something I do to this day.

In addition to art, I always enjoyed reading, writing, and music. During my school years, if there was an opportunity to draw or paint, sing or listen to music, or read or write, I was taking advantage of it. I remember having my art displayed in three county-wide student art shows before I was 10 years old. I vividly remember those three pieces: a colored pencil drawing of a barn on a hillside with a black and white cow in front of it, a charcoal drawing of my cat Candy, and a watercolor of some fuchsias from our backyard. I liked to draw and paint animals, buildings, trees, and flowers from an early age, and that is an artistic theme that followed me into my adulthood in my illustration work, and to some degree into my fine art.

Most of my early art influences were courtesy of my mother, her artist friends, and my paternal step-grandfather, Leo Perrino (1923-2002), a classically-trained artist from Framura, Italy. As a little girl and later as a teenager, I loved to watch Leo paint. As early as grammar school, I knew that art was going to be significant in my life, and Leo encouraged that interest by taking me to museums and art galleries in San Francisco and Carmel, where he taught me about art and artists, the techniques they used, the various art movements, and how to look at, understand, and appreciate art in all its forms and genres.

By understanding art and seeing all its variations, I could appreciate something from almost every artist and every style. As a result, my tastes in art are extremely eclectic. I enjoy equally the works of Kandinsky, Chagall, Monet, Turner, Constable, Peter Max, Innes, Vermeer, Mucha, and many others. I love the French impressionists, the California impressionists, Hudson River School, Barbizons, the Bauhaus Movement, art nouveau, and more. When people ask me who has influenced my work, I can't really answer because I don't feel a direct influence from any particular artist or art movement.

Leo used to take me with him when he went out to sketch or paint and I, of course, brought my own little sketch pad and pencils with me so that I could sketch too. He taught me how to select the focal point of my drawing or painting, to determine the best angle and composition. He taught me how to mix colors, how to use color to create depth or emphasis, and how to see the color of ambient light and accurately replicate that effect with paint. And he taught me about perspective, drawing lines all over some of my drawings to illustrate where the vanishing points should be. When it came to art, Leo never treated me like a child. He didn't hesitate to tell me what I was doing wrong or how I could improve.

My mother always had a bunch of little craft projects to do, such as mosaics and pebble art, weaving and knitting projects, embroidery and needlepoint, clay, and woodburning, so I was never short of something creative to do. Her artist friends visited from time to time and I got to watch them paint and listen to them talking about art. I still have a few small paintings by my mother's distant cousin and childhood friend, the late Washington state artist Dua Feeley.

When I was 9, I started art lessons. My mother didn't drive, so I took the bus to and from Carmel where I formally learned the basic techniques of drawing and painting. For about a year of that time, my mother switched me to a teacher who had me learning to paint in oils. She told me that she wanted me to know how to work in oils because she thought that was what "real" artists did.

By the time I entered junior high, I was constantly drawing and painting in my spare time, and I had more of my work displayed in six student art shows. I only remember a few of those works: one was an intricate ink drawing of an Indian brass bell, one was a very large watercolor of the back of the Larkin House adobe in Monterey, and the other was a detailed pencil and charcoal drawing of two small cottages near Monterey High School. I was very inspired by the local landscape and nature of the area, the pine trees, the oaks, the squirrels, the birds, the fishing boats, the rocky coastline, etc., so I drew and painted that subject matter.

As I got a little older, I spent more time going to the Carmel art galleries after my art classes, and I also went sketching after school, although our backyard was not without things to draw and paint. I still have an old charcoal drawing I did when I was 15, showing the backyard of our house in the afternoon sun through the trees. Art had, by then, become the main focus in my life. I came home from school each day, did my homework as fast as I could, and then drew and painted for hours. I enjoyed fashion — such a typical teenage girl thing — architecture, and landscape. I especially liked drawing in pen and ink, sometimes with felt-tip pens, and I was good with charcoal as well. But, my real talent and my real love was painting, and I was doing a lot of impressionistic and abstract art during that time, mostly in watercolors and occasionally in acrylics.

In college, I worked for two years part-time as an illustrator at an advertising agency, also writing occasional ad copy and jingles. I dropped out of college, but went back and got a couple of vocational certificates in interior design and ornamental horticulture. Then I got a job as the creative director for a book publisher. The publisher was an excellent creative outlet that would later prove to be a fortuitous learning experience. I still painted during every free moment — and I didn't have many of those. But, I managed to find time to create several oils on canvas that were as tall as I was — 6 feet tall. I had my watercolors exhibited at a co-op show and less than a year later had a solo show of my oils in the same local gallery, the latter being very well-received and therefore giving me a significant incentive to pursue my art further.

I moved to southern California where I worked for a landscape contractor and a magazine. A few years later, I became a self-employed designer and started teaching adult ed classes in writing and art technique. I got my first major illustration job and also became a publisher of periodicals. I did a lot of writing and created a lot of art, including commissioned pieces for a few of my interior designer friends and clients, and lots of illustrations and photographs for publishers. I even created and sold decorated clothing on the boardwalk at Venice Beach for about a year. I traveled extensively on business throughout North America, visiting many states several times, and missing only Alaska, Hawaii, and the Dakotas. I managed to see pretty much every major art gallery and museum along the way, and I took as many architectural tours as possible during my busy travels.

I enjoyed participating in many arts and crafts shows, although I didn't do so nearly as often as I would have liked. I experimented with many different art forms, but it always came back to painting for me. I am, to this day, happiest when I have a brush in my hand. I love to write, but not nearly as much as I love to paint or as much as I love art. I did some commissioned paintings for two interior designers, took a variety of small illustration jobs, drew old houses and buildings, created a series of watercolors that I sold at art fairs, and did some portrait photography — headshots — for the wanna-be stars that make up a good portion of the southern California population.

Eventually, I moved back to the Monterey Peninsula, where I finished my bachelor's degree — Language Arts, a double major in English and Linguistics. Then I moved again, this time to Washington state. For the first time in my life, I was living away from the ocean, but near the Puget Sound, in a beautiful forested neighborhood. Everything was green year-round. And, despite what people were always saying about the gray skies of Washington, I was in a place that was far away from the cloudy marine layer and fog banks that blanketed the coast of California for months on end each year. My artistic inspiration was at an all-time high almost immediately — I painted the fir trees in the snow just three days after moving into the house. I developed even more product for my Web sites and I had one idea after another for what I wanted to paint, for different series of paintings, and for how I wanted to sell them.

In a 1915 letter to the author H.G. Wells, fellow author Henry James wrote that "It is art that makes life." And art has indeed made my life. It has always been there to inspire me and to encourage me to continue in my creative pursuits. I hope that when I pass from this world I will leave behind something of my art to be appreciated by others and to be an inspiration to at least a few artists who come after me.