The Camera’s Role in the Process
Don’t be mistaken, however. Jozwiak loves her camera and the thousands of reference photos it’s produced. So pervasive is the camera in her life that her kids and grandkids ignore it. Years ago, when her daughter Briley was in a wedding, the photographer had to instruct Briley to look into the camera.
Jozwiak loves the authenticity, the real-life feel of truly candid pictures. Many of her paintings, such as Universal Canvas, depict the subjects from behind. “I don’t like people to know I’m photographing them,” she says, adding that she prefers to capture them “doing their everyday thing, not posed.”
Frankly, that approach sells better, too, she explains. It’s easier to project one’s own experiences onto the paintings that don’t include detailed, recognizable faces, she says, adding that she often hears viewers of her art say, “That looks like my kid.”
Jozwiak takes 50 or 60 photos for every few she prints out for reference. Still, she has about 10 boxes of categorized photos that come out during her downtime. (Ballet, birds, and beach represent just the Bs in her collection.) So “watching TV” actually means having background noise playing while flipping through her boxes for inspiration for her next painting. It’s a habit that drives her husband a bit bonkers, but, she asks, “How can I change?”
From a photo session at the beach, made specifically to shoot reference photos, came Sunset at Seaside (acrylic on gessobord, 8×10). The bold brushwork gives this simple design its vitality.
Jozwiak loves splashes of unexpected color, so while red dominates in almost all of her paintings, she includes other colors within each block of red, such as the umbrella in A Loving Hand (acrylic on gessobord, 12×16). For the inset reference photo, she sent her grandkids out into the sun to play with an umbrella. She added rain, which conveys movement, but kept the sunlight nevertheless. She created the impression of a bustling city scene in the background.
The Photograph as Starting Point
Jozwiak often combines figures from multiple photos into one painting. In fact, her daughter, now a professional ballet dancer with Ballet Tucson, has appeared multiple times in individual paintings. It helps that Jozwiak often photographs potential subjects in consistent light: either indoors near a window or in the early evening to capture long, dramatic shadows.
She’s not one for experimental sketches but rather plans a strong horizontal and a strong vertical, both at least a little off center. The vertical typically is the figure she’s painting, and it stands out from Jozwiak’s blurred backgrounds, which has become typical of her work over the past three years. She almost always starts with a warm base coat and then draws a detailed depiction of her subject. Once the paint starts to go on, though, she forgets about the lines. They help her paint anatomically accurate figures, but the rest is artistic license.
Jozwiak works swiftly, usually producing four paintings a week and sometimes as many as eight. The day before we talked, she had finished one painting, started and finished another, and begun a third. Jozwiak always was fast, but the speedy approach also allows her to achieve the impasto look using acrylics. She starts at the top of a painting, working on the heads and skies or backgrounds simultaneously, and then moves downward. She paints just one, thick layer, only occasionally adding fresh paint to the background near the head if she takes too long on the face and hair.
The Red Earring (acrylic on gessobord, 9×12) is a tightly rendered portrait full of unexpected colors and varied brushstrokes; a departure from Jozwiak’s figures painted from a distance. The gessobord, smoother than canvas, allowed the paint to move in a manner similar to watercolors.
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