Joyce Ann Burton-Sousa

Profile

City: Asheville
Country: United States

Joined: Oct 2009

I plain and simply love watercolors. No other medium interests me. I put down water and watch the paint flow. I believe there is value in our daily lives and daily tasks. I do not want my paintings to reflect some person doing something somewhere, but rather a particular person doing a particular thing in a particular place. I’ve done a lot of this and that, but none of it had to do with my art which I began in 2004. What matters now is that I am painting. My passion for watercolor and texture is prominent in my work. I enjoy painting a variety of subjects including landscapes and still-lifes, and people engaged in the activity of living—both work and leisure.  

 I have a particular fondness for watercolor because of its fluidity and ability to surprise—even the artist. I indulge that aspect of the medium in my work in many ways. Often I am interrupted, and I will pick up the painting “too soon” and let the colors meander across the paper to the side, top, or bottom edges. Sometimes I am impatient to move on to the next stage of the picture, so the colors-~~still damp~~-are allowed to simply merge as they choose. At other times, life calls and I must stop where I am and pick up later. The flow is halted. Thus paint dries and can leave behind a problem I must return to and resolve. And most often, I just cannot resist the urge to experiment—just to see what happens. My paintings are not drawn in isolation from life, but in the midst of it. I encourage my pictures to reflect all of that. I have no fears about what the paint might do on the paper—where it might go, boundaries it might cross, as well as borders that may form and intrude. I let it live and love to participate in that process. The merger of me and my work; the merger of life and art.   

My paintings are to be enjoyed and celebrated for the pleasure involved in their creation in the hope that pleasure can be passed on to others.   Please visit my website.

For those who are interested, professional information is below:

  I hold the Masters Degree in Psychology and have many years of professional experience in counseling and mental health centers, schools, a treatment center for male adolescents, the Correctional Center at Urbana (IL), a women’s prison, alternatives to violence counseling in schools, as well as private practice.  I have given workshops on anger, stress, anger between parent and child, domestic violence, self-esteem, criminality and irresponsible behavior, substance abuse, suicide risk, and general mental health and have written several articles on these topics and co-authored two books. I have designed programs for a variety of populations including parents, adolescents, college students, both perpetrators and victims of domestic violence, general offenders, and both men and women who are homeless and/or in transition and written the curricula and created the materials for those programs.  I have worked abundantly in schools where I have focused on discipline and classroom management. Two additional books entitled “The Accountability Factor: Dealing with Difficult People” and “The Baby of The Family” are not yet in print.  I was a founding partner of Cognition Works, Inc., a consulting and counseling agency that offers individual and couples counseling, parent