About the Artist

 

Joan Sebastian was raised and educated in Massachusetts.  She studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she earned a BA in Fine Arts in 1987.  She worked several years as a draftsman while continuing to pursue her career as an artist.  She studied French and traveled several times to the Jura Mountains in France to paint landscapes.  She also painted cows in Vermont, where her sister has a dairy farm.  The cow paintings, ¾-sized-works, were quickly executed and thickly painted.  These paintings have found their way into several corporate collections.

 

In 2002 she discovered Hawaii and began traveling there twice a year to paint.  She moved to San Diego in 2003 and became a full-time artist.  The availability of Hawaiian nude beaches led her to begin painting nudes.  Her paintings are of people she meets in Hawaii.  They are ordinary people who are comfortable with their nudity and with nature. She makes quick black-and-white sketches of them and takes a photograph for reference.  Although Sebastian works from a photograph, she feels that there is something that goes beyond what the camera sees and that the information gathered during the modeling session reveals itself within the final painting.  In that sense, her work has been compared to Alice Neel’s paintings.

 

In her studio in San Diego she creates the final painting in oil.  She begins with a drawing, which she treats as an abstract form to be filled with sensuous brush strokes.  The drips, the gesso ground peeking through here and there, all add a certain liveliness in her work.   In her most recent paintings she chooses to leave the background unpainted.  Now all the false starts, mistakes, trials and notes are visible.  In doing so, she shares the history of the painting with the viewer.

 

Sebastian’s Hawaiian landscapes are all done from watercolor studies.  Often they contain a small cabin, giving the viewers a glimpse of themselves living in paradise.  Sebastian continues to paint cows in Vermont and beef cattle in Hawaii.

 

The oil paintings that you see in her portfolio were all painted between 2004 and 2013.  Prices range from $500 to $2000 and are available by request.

 

Represented By:   Noel-Baza Fine Art, San Diego, California

                                   Elaine Beckwith Gallery, Jamaica, Vermont

Corporate and Museum Collections

Cabot Creamery, Montpelier, Vermont

Hood Business Park, Boston, Massachusetts

Ringe Media, Inc., Washington, DC

Automated Trading Desk, Inc., Charleston, SC

New England Quilt Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts

Vermont Land Trust, Montpelier, Vermont