A Portrait of the Artist: JoAnn Clayton Townsend

Next month, September 2011, abstract painter JoAnn Clayton Townsend will be the artist-in-residence in the Chautauqua Stone Tower at Glen Echo Park in Glen Echo, Maryland. The residency offers artists the opportunity to show their work in a public setting while working to produce new work in the same space. Townsend will be hosting an open house toward the end of her residency and an artist talk on September 24 and 25, respectively.

"This is a great time to be at Glen Echo," said Clayton who lives only a stone's throw away in Cabin John and has taken many classes at the park's Yellow Barn Studio and Gallery, with Walt Bartman, Helen Corning, and others.

"The Labor Day Art Show will bring a lot of people to the area. The carousel is open through September 25, and the pottery and jewelry galleries are open at all times. My work will be up on the walls in the tower, and people can just drop in to see it. I am looking forward to lots of visits."

The Stone Tower Residency is not Townsend's sole tie to Glen Echo Park and the Yellow Barn. She is a member of the Outloud Artists, former students of Helen Corning. They meet each Tuesday, alongside some of Corning's other former students, for a weekly class in the Yellow Barn and show together regularly at venues throughout the Washington, D.C.-area. For the time being, the group is not looking for new members.

"Helen Corning was our teacher. She is an abstract painter, and what's wonderful about her, is that she did not teach us to paint like her. Everyone's work came out different. When she retired last year, Walt Bartman gave us a studio space where we continue to meet weekly," said Townsend who has been in charge of booking shows for the Outloud Artists.

Townsend has also taken classes at the Corcoran College of Art and Design with internationally renowned Color Field Painter Sam Gilliam and at the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria with Brenda Belfield. She is an Associate Member of the Torpedo Factory and has been painting out of a ground floor studio at the facility for four months out of the year for the past four years.

"I'm one of those people who always knew she was a painter, but life led me other places," says Townsend who also structures her life story into three parts. Throughout her tripartite odyssey, she always found time to paint.

Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, she spent the first two decades after graduating college on the diplomatic road with her husband who was in the Foreign Service. The couple lived in Jordan, India, Bulgaria, Iran, Israel and Turkey throughout the 1960s and ‘70s.

Townsend studied the languages, archaeology, history and culture of the countries she lived in and also "always found a corner in which to paint."

After returning to the United States, she took a job as a Legislative Assistant on Capitol Hill.

"When I returned from abroad, I felt very patriotic and wanted to get involved in government and politics," said Townsend.

Four years of grueling work in a competitive environment, her husband's death and the need to spend more time with her children led Townsend to seek a more moderate tempo at work. She found it in the National Academy of Sciences where she started in the International Relations department and seguewayed into the Engineering department through a study she did on the International Solar Polar Mission for Congress. While at the Academy she found time to get a Master’s Degree in Science Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University, became Director of the Aeronautics and Space Engineering Board and got remarried.

When she was finished with her masters program, Townsend saw an opportunity to further her art education. That was when she began taking classes at the Yellow Barn with Walt Bartman. She accompanied him on many landscape painting trips and workshops, but Townsend felt a special predilection for abstract expression. Bartman eventually referred her to Corning who would become her first stepping stone into abstraction.

"Painting abstractly through intuition is a risky way to paint," says Townsend. "You never know what you'll come out with, and it may take a long time to come up with something satisfactory."

In Belfield’s class at the Torpedo Factory, Townsend had a lot of freedom to splash, drip and use a palette knife on her paintings.

"Belfield is an intuitive painter herself. She was a strong influence on me. To be intuitive means to have no concept of what you'll go into. It means to paint like a child, but then you always have the chance to distill that and make something out of it."

Townsend classifies herself as a Colorist Abstract Painter.

"I don't shy away from bright colors. Paint and color both excite me. My paintings are very happy paintings, said the artist who cites Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, J.M.W.Turner and Emily Mason as some of her influences.

"I like Rothko a lot. He uses many layers of paint, and his paintings vibrate. Sitting in a room with his work is practically a religious experience. The Phillips Collection dedicated three floors to a Diebenkorn show at one point. At first, I didn't like his work from books, but seeing it in person was such a moving experience. Turner has an entire gallery dedicated to him at the Tate. When you look at his work you might think the guy is painting ships and the ocean, but to me, he is painting light. Like Rothko's, his works are full of depth and color."

Townsend paints in acrylic, which has a fast drying time. This quality allows her to layer the paint as much as needed to achieve the vibrant effects she seeks. She also incorporates some collage in her work, but is careful to "not overdo it."

Lately she has been creating a lot of diptychs, paintings that are painted onto two separate panels or canvases. Sometimes she starts out her paintings with a big roller to lay the groundwork for the subtleties to come.

"I see it as creating shapes within forms. You have a body and then the surprises within. Some pieces might not have a single straight line in them, but they are still structured," she says referring to "I'll Meet You There," a large mixed media diptych with golden hues.

"The 'Cosmic Song' series was inspired by my outer space career. I paint layers of paint in circular motion with splatters and depth. I usually paint on the floor," she said.

Always trying new things, Townsend does not "like to go back and paint the same painting again and again."

"My life is so short, I want to keep experimenting and go onto other things. I still have so much to learn," she says.

Recently her work became part of a collection of 54 Washington-area artists who created designs for a deck of playing cards for Art in Hand Cards, a national project to generate funds for local arts nonprofits and retailers and help artists reach a broader audience. Townsend's design is for the seven of spades and features a colorful spiraling background.

"I've been very busy this year," said Townsend who was in group shows at the Waverly Street Gallery and the River Road Unitarian Universalist Church in Bethesda, in Rockville and the in Gaithersburg.

In October, she will be exhibiting her work as part of a group show in the art gallery at the Ratner Museum in Bethesda.

To visit the artist's website, click here.