Joyce Koskenmaki

Joyce Koskenmaki was raised in Herman Michigan, a small Finnish-American community in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Living in Herman with tow sets of grandparents that emigrated from Finland in the early 1900’s, Joyce naturally learned at a young age about her Finnish heritage. At the same time Joyce also began to draw pictures on butcher paper and unpainted walls, igniting her passion for art. Present in many of Joyce’s current paintings and drawings are elements of her childhood, especially her Finnish ancestry and the Upper Peninsula, but also noticeable is the inner stillness, the feeling of “beyond time” and the deep reality, which holds it all together.

Joyce finds this stillness throughout the Upper Peninsula. She says “the wilderness around this area necessarily impacts upon the images which I choose. However, there is a deep level of involvement which expresses itself metaphorically through my work, through the relationships of shapes and colors and light and dark streaming from my early childhood memories and experiences lived in this place and remembered through a lifetime of years lived elsewhere.”

Joyce’s life has taken her to a variety of places. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois and a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the University of Iowa. She has taught art of six colleges and universities, but despite all of the places she has lived, Joyce only feels at home in the Upper Peninsula, a place where she finds inspiration for her paintings, drawings, quilts, and fiber art which have been nationally and internationally displayed in solo and group exhibitions.

With all her artwork, Joyce’s goal is to bring to light the hidden sacred elements of nature, to make people more aware of what they are losing and to attempt to preserve it before it is too late. Despite it being a vulnerable ecosystem, Joyce believes that, “Nature does reclaim itself, nurse its own wounds, and make itself ready for new life.”

“My painting is about this. I don’t make judgments about it; I just try to be aware and see all the levels represented in the nature I know and paint. That’s what I came here to do. I try to do it as simply and straightforwardly as possible, using the visual tools gathered from a lifetime of painting and teaching others to paint. The colors, contrasts, the way the shapes fit themselves together in the space, these are what I use to speak with, the voice I have chosen.”

Horizontal Evergreen Island (Ranta) Print View Details	Vertical Island Evergreen Print View Details

Learn more about Joyce Koskenmaki at webpages.charter.net/joycekoskenmaki