Joyce Frances Devlin: Painter & A Painted House

As part of the Jane’s Walk Burritt’s Rapids community festival, Ms. Devlin will be exhibiting select pieces in the main gallery space of the Burritt’s Rapids Community Hall on May 2nd & May 3rd, 2015.

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If I had any sense, I would pound a wooden stake into my front lawn, attach a five kilometre length of string, and scribe a zone of exploration around my house. To some degree, I’ve theoretically begun to do this, knocking on doors and dropping off flyers for our upcoming Jane’s Walk events here in Burritt’s Rapids. With every person I speak with I realize how little I know about the people who live beyond the adjacent properties. We think we have to go far to find interesting, but we don’t.

Joyce Frances Devlin and I have known of each other for years but had never formally met. We’re not talking a bustling metropolis here: We live in rural Ottawa with .5 km of paved road, a slight rise in the land and maybe six houses on acreage between us. We share mutual friends and acquaintances, admire the same views of the countryside, likely drive past each other on quiet roads.

I discovered her work at The Ottawa Art Gallery shortly after the close of her one-woman show So Much Beauty in 2011. Several of her pieces are part of the local treasure trove of the O.J. & Isobel Firestone Collection. It was a confluence of bad and good timing – missing the exhibition but discovering the artist – and I had to settle for the catalogue which I planned to get signed one day.

Until I picked up the phone and cold-called her about exhibiting during our upcoming community festival, we remained a mystery to one another. A cup of coffee, fresh figs and a torrent of conversation about our common B.C. roots followed. She signed the catalogue, agreed to exhibit her work, and a few days later I began photographing her fantastical painted house.

Devlin has earned her professional respect and, arguably, more. Her work is part of private and public collections worldwide.

She was born in Fort Fraser, British Columbia and studied at the Vancouver School of Art between 1950 and 1954, under Jack Shadbolt, Peter Aspell and Gordon A. Smith, amidst a heavily modernist art scene. She experimented with abstraction, creating boldly coloured collages and patterned canvases. Yet, she remained devoted to a wider variety of subject matter, developing an interest in portraiture, landscape, and symbolic imagery. Devlin created what she called “interior landscapes”: spiritually metaphorical images of birds and flowers as well as the juxtaposition of abstract collage with landscape imagery. She moved herself and her two young sons from British Columbia in 1965, and has since lived and worked in the Ottawa region. ((http://www.ottawaartgallery.ca/node/4))

She did what few women could do at the time: She supported her family with sales of her commissioned portraits, her best-known, one of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson. At 83, she continues to paint and sell.

Aside from exhibiting select works at the Hall, Devlin is preparing for a solo show at her home studio May 30 & 31 and Saturday, June 6th & Sunday, June 7th, 2015 from 11:00am to 5:00pm. The studio address is 7590 Dwyer Hill Rd, Burritt’s Rapids. As well, the show will remain up until the end of June (by appointment only).

Please contact her directly at (613) 269-4458 to view, purchase or commission work.