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Joan Cobb Marsh

Joan Cobb Marsh is a known and globally collected artist who specializes in oil paintings. Although oil is her first love, she has worked in collage, watercolor and drawing.  Known for her interiors, recent paintings show scenes of Provincetown life, colors and lanes of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico and the shorelines of New England, California and Miami's South Beach area.

 

Marsh perfected her sensitivity to color under Henry Henche, a student of Charles Hawthorne.  After receiving an AAS and BFA from Rochester Institute of Technology, she was Graphics Supervisor in the Department of Instructional Development's Media Center.  As Adjunct Professor, Marsh taught graphics and developed a course in Advanced Collage.

 

In 2000, Marsh was granted a residency sponsored by the Lower  Manhattan Cultural Council for the Arts, New York City. In her studio on the 108th floor of the Twin Towers, she painted many works depicting the spectacular views, three of which were lost in the 9/11 tragedy.  A Residency at a historic dune shack at the Cape Cod National Seashore enabled Marsh to produce paintings of a landscape that was a part of her family's heritage.

An accomplished musician/composer said, "Music is memory." Painting also is memory reconnecting, a revisiting of emotional content. Henri Matisse saw no logical reasons for explanations of his work; I concur. A person stops, looks; the painter has succeeded. All is on the canvas and the viewer now experiences...Universal Truths. (Love/Hate, Enlightenment/Confusion, Harmony/Chaos, Ecstasy/Despair.) It is all there for the viewer. Delacroix stated, "Great paintings transcend the sublime." A painter's mandate is not material gains, self-gratification, or pretty pictures, but a good faith attempt to capture the fleeting visual beauty of our relationship to worldly gifts. In a glimpse resides an eternity.

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