Joella Jean Mahoney, acclaimed landscape artist, will narrate a personal retrospective spanning four decades of paintings on Wednesday, April 9, at 1:30 p.m. in the Hampton Room of the Malott Commons on the Scripps College campus. Mahoney’s published 2-volume catalog, Retrospective, will be available for purchase at the event, and 40% of the sales will be donated to the Scripps Fine Arts Foundation to support student programs. This lecture is sponsored by the Scripps College Fine Arts Foundation, and is free and open to the public. For program information, please call Corrinne Gallman at (909) 626-6715.
Preferring to paint large-scale semi-abstractions, celebrated artist Joella Jean Mahoney draws inspiration from the desert landscapes and indigenous life with which she comes in contact while backpacking through Sedona, Arizona and the Utah border. Her works are first painted in small-scale on location, then re-created in large-scale in her Sedona studio. Each painting is created as a response to this varied and colorful terrain, and the end result is a unique exploration of idea, thought, and feeling. Mahoney’s two-volume Retrospective contains a compilation of these paintings from 1965 through 2002 alongside personally scripted notes that express the artist’s impressions about each work. According to critics: “Mahoney’s work is of size and color; it is work of intimacy, sensuality and privacy. Her work transcends the confines of geography.”
Mahoney’s canvasses have traveled internationally through the Art-in-the-Embassies Program sponsored by the U.S. State Department, and her work as teacher and artist has been featured in a three-part television series, “On Campus,” which aired on educational television stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and New York City.
Mahoney, emeritus art professor with the University of La Verne, earned her bachelor’s degree from Northern Arizona University and her master’s in fine art from Claremont Graduate University.