Joanne Taylor

Joanne Taylor a self-taught artist from South Africa paints the most amusing and interesting oils.  At times she ventures into the more surreal side of art, depicting characters from a mystical world of Chameleon and Fairy creatures. In recent years her paintings have become very collectible here in Ireland.Joanne was born and grew up in the middle of Africa, then northern Rhodesia, in 1952. She left Zambia as a mother of three toddlers and moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, but could not settle in the city, and within a few years relocated to Knysna, a small town on the Cape Coast.

Whilst in the Cape she exhibited at several galleries and sold through the local Art Cafe, selling to European, Australian and American tourists as well as to a thriving local collectors market and was voted Artist of the Southern Cape for the year 1995. However in 2000 after independence the local economy suffered greatly from the exodus of professionals and she lost 75% of her buyers. Joanne decided to move out of Africa.

Having experienced living in America, Hong-Kong and England for short periods, Joanne eventually came to Ireland on the advice of people who said it would "suit people like her"! She lived in Killarney for three years, but then moved to Dublin.

“I appreciate how privileged I am to love the work I do, but feel even luckier when others enjoy what I produce. Being self-taught, I have no academic agenda or formula with technique, but am fuelled entirely by the energy and joy of imagination, which allows me to have fun, and make fun, by recombining personal fragments of memories into new images, invoking for others, I hope, the same sense of humour and paradox which life is.”