Joan Anderson

Painting

Invented Landscapes

Festival of Iron

Work on Silk

Painting: I use the term broadly to include all my studio activities—things like sewn textiles, calligraphy, drawing, leatherwork, magazine design, as well as painting in the usual sense. All these activities get at what is difficult to express in words, what resists visibility in other ways.

Meditation: another way to appreciate wordlessness and my curiosity about silence and life underneath the skim of concepts. I’ve been gratefully and indelibly imprinted by Buddhist meditation and retreat practice.

Teaching painters: without people to teach us and students to teach, the transmission stream of beauty from one heart/mind to another is endangered. It is beauty, that which expresses its essential nature, that makes life, even a life beset with difficulty and suffering, worth greeting the day and the lovely night.

Joan Anderson publishes An0An, a magazine dedicated to the art of the sketchbook, and is the co-founder of Mountain Water, an across-discipline artists’ residency studio in southern Colorado where art and meditation meet.