Joshua Field
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Joshua Field (born 1973) is a contemporary symbolic narrative painter.
Joshua Field is known for poetically driven narrative paintings that are at once iconic, psychological and subversive. Arrays of archetypical imagery culled from both the collective consciousness and the realm of the intensely personal suggest both sociological issues and mythic individual dramas. Field has exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently represented by Kolok Gallery. He lives and works in North Adams, Massachusetts and holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD and a degree from the Pinellas County Center for the Arts in St. Petersburg, FL.
Field attended a high school for the arts, the Pinellas County Center for the Arts, in St. Petersburg, Florida. Upon admission, he entered an intensely creative environment, an experience that formed his classical foundation. He was influenced by what is often called the proto-pop movement, a time when abstract expressionism clashed with the introduction of the ready-made, found object and assimilated commercial imagery of the pop art movement. Florida’s gulf coast is a haven for the proto-pop elite, including Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist.
Joshua then attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore where he expanded his education. At MICA, he focused on assemblage/collage and poetry, and was mentored by Joe Cardarelli, a renowned beat poet and friend of Alan Ginsberg, Andrei Codrescu, Anselm Hollo and Robert Creeley. Field connected readily with poetry as the assembly of text to create alternative narrative structures is an ideal analogue for narrative symbolic imagery.
After graduating a semester early in 1996, Joshua moved to the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, which was quickly becoming a Mecca for the visual arts. He established a studio in the town of North Adams, Massachusetts, where the largest contemporary art museum on the east coast, the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, had just opened. There, he began a long involvement with the Contemporary Artists Center which began as a studio residency and eventually led to Field presiding over the CAC’s board of directors. Field currently lives and works in North Adams, MA and maintains a studio at the Historic Windsor Mill.
[edit] Influences
- Robert Rauschenberg - Proto-Pop Painter
- Larry Rivers - Pop Painter
- Willem De Kooning - Abstract Expressionist Painter
- Ray Johnson - Proto-Pop Collagist and Mail Artist
- Charles Olson - Poet
- Joe Cardarelli - Beat Poet
- Anselm Hollo - Poet
- Arshile Gorky - Modernist Painter
- Cy Twombly - Abstract Expressionist Painter
