Oh, hi there.

So, you’ve stumbled upon my little corner of the internet. Welcome! My name is Joy, and I’m a printmaker and artist working out of her home in Ontario, Canada that I share with my husband, little girl, and canine companion. I hope you find something here that you not only like, but that resonates with you, and that you can cherish for years to come.

Art has been an integral part of my life quite literally longer than I can remember. There are countless photographs of little Joy drawing and colouring whenever there was time and wherever there was space — even in the hospital room when my little brother was born. The margins of my notebooks were filled with doodles (did anyone else draw approximately one million realistic eyes on their notes?). Eventually I found my way to watercolours, a medium which I still love and practice and which holds a special place in my heart and personal history, but found that my perfectionism and left-brain way of thinking was holding back my creativity.

Enter printmaking.

I’ve had a fascination with printmaking since high school, but it always seemed like such an inaccessible medium. I certainly couldn’t afford a press working part-time at the pharmacy, nor was it feasible for me to work with the acids and solvents needed for etching processes. I didn’t have the graphic kind of brain for linocuts which would have at least allowed for hand printing, and so I let that unrealized interest lie.

And then, in 2021, I decided to get creative.

So I started creating small dark field monotypes (single edition prints using a method of reduction) and drypoint prints using my mom’s Cuttlebug embossing machine. If you have a scrapbooker in your life (or are one yourself), you probably know what I’m talking about. That cute little green and cream machine meant to emboss scrapbooking paper with fun designs and cut out little shapes for your layouts. I looked at it and realized that it was essentially just a teeny tiny printing press. I added a few minor modifications from craft supplies I already had, and hey presto — I’m cranking out 5x7 prints and beginning to think that printmaking was what I was meant to do all along. Because finally I found a medium where I could combine all my favourite subjects, whether portrait or landscape, still life or floral, and have the work feel cohesive. To feel like all the beautiful old photographs I have spent my whole life admiring and scouring, and most importantly, to feel inexorably like me.