An Artist With a Story in the Clouds

THE ARTIST
Joan Blumenfeld

BETWEEN ARCHITECTURE AND ART
“I think of myself as an artist right now. I’ll always be an architect; that’s just a part of who I am and always will be. There’s so much similarity—you’re dealing with materiality, and color, and light, and form, and composition— and it’s kind of funny, because in the one case you’re taking things in two dimensions and making them into three dimensions. And in the other, you’re taking things in three dimensions and putting them into two dimensions.”

TO THE MOUNTAINS
“We love to ski, and when we decided we were going to cut back on working, we decided to live in the Tahoe area and we love it. I feel that you constantly have to re-create your life and re-create yourself. I always felt that as an architect, also— somehow the creative process is always creating something new.”

READING THE SKY
“It’s almost a cliché, but coming out here, the vistas are so grand. You can see storms coming for 50 miles. The clouds are dynamic; they’re always changing. And you can watch them change and try to catch a moment in time. That moment gives you an idea of the before and the after—where it’s going. There has to be an element of a story there. With any painting, you want people to have an emotional connection with what they’re looking at, whether it’s because you’re showing something that’s familiar to them, that strikes a chord within them and that they can relate to in some way, or you’re showing them something that was once familiar but you showed it in a different way that surprises them.”

NEXT
Blumenfeld’s work will be featured in the Reno Tahoe International Art Show, September 8-11.