About The Artist
Joanne Stichweh retired as a professor Emerita in the Otterbein University Department of Art in 2009. She taught art history and studio art courses including drawing, painting, and ceramics for thirty years. A graduate of Otterbein, she received her MFA from The Ohio State University. As a professional artist, Ms. Stichweh has been a frequent local and regional exhibitor
whose work has received many awards. Her paintings are included in numerous public, private, and corporate collections
The work in this exhibition are selections from a span of forty years of paintings, from 1979 to 2009. In a sense, the Urban Acupuncture show is a small scale retrospective, a compilation showing the development of the artist over a period of time
I find that the most meaningful method of artistic production involves working in series form – investigating theme and variation. Each individual painting shown here was part of a larger group of work, usually 10 to 20 works exploring a particular subject or theme. As an art historian and a contemporary painter, I am particularly interested in producing images which synthesize works from throughout the history of art, juxtaposing motifs derived from art historical sources both ancient and modern.
Various media employed include oil and acrylic paint, commercial house paint, metallic and textured spray paint, and oil stick. Sources for the cut paper collage elements consist of images from books of antique botanical prints, reproductions from medieval herbals, art journals, calendars, wallpaper books, and seed catalogues.
My cut-paper collage-paintings are process oriented; there is concern for gestural, spontaneous, energetic mark making contrasting with hard-edged shapes. Complex patterns and exploration of color – exuberant and intense color as well as subtle, nuanced color – characterize my paintings. Always, I am concerned with creating formally strong compositions.