Jack Joiner
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 3 min read
Jack Joiner is a painter based in the UK. He moved from portrait painting to abstraction, seeking more freedom than photography offered. He explores big ideas from physics, consciousness, and everyday emotions. In works like “Gravitational Collapse of an Intermediate Mass Star” and “The Temporary Nature of Happiness,” he turns scientific processes and personal feelings into form. His process is slow and instinctive. He adds and removes paint until the image feels balanced. The finished pieces are direct and focused, with no unnecessary elements on the surface.
Q: You do your best work at the edge of what you understand. What keeps you chasing that point?
A: Complacency is a dangerous thing for an artist. When I was a portrait painter, I worked myself into a technical cul-de-sac. I painted from photographs, so if I wanted to make a pink painting, I'd have to first find something pink to photograph instead of just buying pink paint. That indirectness felt silly, and the hard fact of a photograph was too specific a thing for me to express myself within. I'd been working to achieve an accurate likeness and once I'd done that it didn't interest me anymore, the well had dried up. Abstract painting always fascinated me the most yet was antithetical to how I was working, so I had to move away from what was known and what was comfortable. I have a freedom in my work now that I didn't before.
Q: Your paintings sit somewhere between abstraction and depiction. How did that balance find you?
A: A lot of the time, making art is like firing an arrow and drawing a bullseye around where it lands. Sometimes you know exactly what you're aiming for and sometimes you're shooting in the dark.
The energy and immediacy of abstraction suit my temperament as a painter, and I always need a solid idea that I'm trying to communicate if it's ever going to be successful. Big ideas like “Gravitational Collapse...” require meticulous planning and have every step to completion laid out before the first mark is made. Yet others require a bit of swimming around on the canvas before hitting upon what it is I'm making.
Q: “Gravitational Collapse of an Intermediate Mass Star” turns a cosmic process into something almost spiritual. What pulled you to that story?
A: When I first heard a physicist describe this process, I thought it was the most beautifully poetic thing I've ever heard, despite their very bland delivery. We are made of tiny pieces of dead stars, and can feel the radiation of our host star on our skin. We are the universe experiencing itself. Artists have always worked from nature and this is a type of nature which is relatively new to our understanding. It's a grand subject matter so it required a suitably grand depiction.
Q: In “The Temporary Nature of Happiness”, emotion becomes pattern and movement. How did that idea start?
A: This idea didn't crystallise till quite late on, and was painted mostly in the portrait orientation. I have to do a Rorschach test on it constantly to try and understand what I'm saying. It was after the fern-like structure appeared on the left that I knew it was something in full bloom, and so by definition, something that will eventually decay and die. The dominant warm colours spoke of happiness and the blues, its natural counterpart, a less prevalent constant in the moment, and in the painting.
Q: You’ve worked with scientists and clinics studying psychedelics. How does that world shape the way you paint?
A: The first project I did after making the switch from portraiture was for The Centre for Psychedelic Research. Making art specifically for an environment where people are taking large amounts of psychedelics caused me to think pretty hard about how my work was being perceived. It made me acutely aware of how everyone is carrying a different history behind their eyes, which affects the way they see things.
Q: When you talk about change as a constant, does it feel like a subject — or more like a condition you work inside of?
A: Change has definitely been the underlying subject of my most recent work. Lately, big changes like birth and death have been in my life and paintings have grown out of those seeds. I've never had two days of my life that were the same so it makes sense for that to be represented in my work. However, constantly seeking novelties is in a way a kind of repetition so in time I'm sure this will change too.
