Joan Folinsbee, artist and writer

Joan Folinsbee is a painter who has lived and worked in Toronto and Thornhill, Ontario, and the Eastern Townships of Quebec. She graduated from the Ontario College of Art, and her early influences were the Impressionists and the Group of Seven. Later, she enrolled in the Fine Art Studio Programme at York University and became fascinated with Modern Art and the American Abstract Expressionists.

She has won awards for her work and exhibits widely. Today, she lives and works in Thornbury and its environs, integrating into her paintings the Niagara Escarpment, the cool waters of Georgian Bay, and the people who live there.

For many years she sought to combine her paintings, drawings, and small pen and pencil sketches, with essays dating back to the early seventies, still relevant, she thinks, to life today.

Eventually she mastered a computer well enough to self-publish a small illustrated book, Contraries: An Artist’s Life. She is about to complete a second book, Life Sketches, illustrated by her drawings and paintings of the nude.