about

A photograph of Joan Anderson in southern Colorado.

Welcome.
I’m glad you found your way here.

What there is to say about me could be summed up this way: I am a painter with other motives. That is, I see painting as a way to communicate what is difficult to express in words, what resists being visible in any other way. I also use the term “painter” broadly – it covers everything I do in the studio, everything you’ll find on this website. Things like sewn textiles, leather, tree trunks, carpentry, wire and steel, linen and wool. And cotton and silk.

I am a meditator. That also is an appreciation of wordlessness, a curiosity about silence and life underneath the skim of concepts. I’ve been indelibly imprinted as an artist and human by Buddhist meditation and retreat practice. I am grateful to the teachers and community of practitioners who have taught and supported me.

I, too, am a teacher. I teach painters. So again, I am grateful to all my teachers and students without whom the transmission stream dries up, the transmission stream of wisdom that passes from one mind and heart to another. And the transmission stream of beauty that makes life, even a life beset with difficulty and suffering, worth greeting the day and the lovely night.

Send word if you like.