Joy Laville
Since that time, her work has focused on the loss of her husband, directly or indirectly with themes of finality, eternity and wondering what more is there.
[1] While Joy was conceived in India, her mother decided to go to England to give birth because she lost her first pregnancy.
[1][2] Joy describes herself as a child as quiet and sensitive but happy, near the ocean with her talent for drawing appearing early.
Due to the needs of the war, Joy soon joined the Observer Corps in Yorkshire, where she worked to detect and map the movement of Allied and Axis planes as they flew over England.
[1] Later, Joy met Kenneth Rowe, an artilleryman with the Royal Canadian Air Force which whom she married at age 21 and went to live in Canada.
[1][3] In Canada, her husband obtained a permit to log in the forests of British Columbia, which led the couple to live in very remote locations.
At the beginning of the 1970s, Von Gunten moved in with her and helped her develop as an artist for two years until he decided to return to Mexico City.
[2][4] When his mother died, the couple decided to live in Europe, spending time in London, Greece and Spain before settling in Paris in 1980.
Ibargüengoitia called her “la mujer lila” or the “lily woman” and sometimes referred to her as “Cleo” in his writings.
[5] She had her first exhibition in Mexico City in 1964 and two years later her work appeared at the Confrontación 66 event at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, winning an acquisition prize.
He also brought her work to the attention of Inés Amor, the owner of the largest and most prestigious gallery in Mexico City.
[2] After that she exhibited her work in various cities in Mexico as well as New York, New Orleans, Dallas, Washington, Toronto, Paris, London and Barcelona .
[8] Her work has been featured on the covers of books written by her husband and has been an artist in residence for the Universidad de la Américas.
Her work can be found in the collections of the Dallas Museum, the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, the Museo de Arte Moderno and the collections of the Banco Nacional de México, BBVA Bancomer and Esso Oil of Canada.
[5] Although best known for painting (oils and acrylics), Laville has done a number of projects including graphics, pastels and sculpture.
[8] While she never followed the tenets of the muralism movement, she did not work to challenge it, like the Generación de la Ruptura did.
[6][8] Art critic Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros has said that her work would be inexplicable without Mexico as a context.
Her work has been compared to that of Milton Avery as both use wide, monochromatic spaces to convey a sense of suspended time as well as pastel colors and figures with fuzzy boundaries.
Until her husband's death, Laville's art mostly reflected the everyday in life with a contemplative quality, with self-portraits and landscapes dominating.
[2] Ibargüengoitia described her paintings as neither symbolic, allegorical nor realistic, rather “they are a window into a mysteriously familiar world.
They are enigmas which are not necessary to resolve, but it is interesting to perceive them.”[4][7] Oddly, just before the accident in 1982, she painted a scene similar to those she would afterwards: a woman with no eyes sitting along in a desert of pinks and other colors.
These paintings were followed by a series called Landfalls and Departures which explored the inevitable loss after forming attachments based on the dreams she has after her husband's death.
[2][11] She work emphasizes blues, greens and whites for similar reasons, symbols of water and of peace.
[11][12] She remains interested in the end, infinity, death, apocalypse, paradise, eternity and immortality, with the idea of trying to name the unnamable.
