"Life in a Fish Bowl" by Joanna Athey
When Joanna Athey retired in 1994 she wondered what she was going to do with all the time on her hands. A homemaker for many years and staffer at National Geographic in Gaithersburg when her children had grown, she had never been interested in art. She couldn’t sing and she couldn’t draw, she says. But that didn’t stop her from taking a watercolor class with Elizabeth Smith Carlson in 1996 and then later, after a struggle with watercolor, a collage class.
Collage clicked. “I found myself ripping and tearing and feeling like I was back in school,” says Athey in her wry way of her first experiences in collage.
An exhibiting member of the Washington Street Artists’ Cooperative, Athey has taken many classes from teachers around the country. “I like to experiment in different media,” she explains, but she always returns to collage because she likes the texture of this art form, the almost sculptural quality she can bring to the piece.
“There is something in you,” Athey says, “that wants more color and texture.” Her favorite colors are the reds, gold, oranges, as is evident in her striking pieces.
All those painting classes have given her something else she didn’t anticipate: material for her collage work. She tears up her old watercolor paintings for collages, building layers and layers of colors that form themselves into landscapes, abstracts, and one delicious portrait of a woman who wears one of Athey’s earrings.
“Being an artist,” she says, “is being willing to experiment and create.”
A piece starts as an idea, or something she sees in nature or a photograph. “Sometimes when I don’t know what I want to do, I start just tearing up paper and putting it down.” Always, complementary colors, texture, and mood are part of her process.
This is not a quick process, however. Athey starts a piece, sets it up in the studio, and looks at it from various angles. She studies it, trying to decide what she wants to do. “I try to think of the principles and elements of design, to see if everything is in balance, and,” she adds with a slight smile, “if I like it whether I followed the rules or not.”
Although she’s been a working artist for 16 years, Athey doesn’t call herself a full-time artist. She wants to work when the mood hits her, not because she must. Having a studio her son built for her in the basement of her Charles Town home allows her to be alone with her work when she wants and close the door and “leave my mess” until the mood hits again.
“I don’t want to do anymore art unless I have fun,” she says adamantly. “Maybe as a child, I did what everyone else was doing. Now, at my age, I am doing what I do. It’s my own.”
-Ginny Fite
