Gallery With A Cause • Located in the New Mexico Cancer Center • Benefitting the NMCC Foundation
Please call gallery director Regina Held to arrange a private gallery tour, make a purchase, or ask any questions.
Joan Findley-Perls is a nature artist based in Corrales, New Mexico, working primarily in watercolor with pen and ink, alongside graphite and ink, with devoted precision. Raised in the high desert of the American Southwest, in the Rio Grande valley, and shaped by Celtic heritage, she observes each subject with patient attention - every feather, every line of beak, claw, and limb. Her watercolors carry her work into color and light, joined by a handful of older graphite and pen-and-ink drawings - the medium where her looking began, line laid down slowly, form built from the structure outward.
She is drawn to the architecture beneath beauty - the bones of a wing, the coil of muscle beneath a lion's hide, the boneless grace of an octopus - the way a creature holds both stillness and the suggestion of movement. Her work lives in the spaces between: seen and unseen, wild and domestic, observation and intuition, where what begins as realism often bends toward metaphor, so a bird becomes a messenger and an animal a keeper of memory. Both pencil and pigment ask for a particular honesty -neither forgives a hesitant hand - and that discipline is its own kind of devotion to the subject.
The daughter of a biologist and birder and an artist mother, she inherited her father's habit of looking closely at the natural world and her mother's instinct to make something of what she saw. She hopes these pieces reward sustained looking, revealing new detail with time, and invite the viewer to find their own meaning in something they thought they already knew.