About Joan Templer

After graduating with honors from Natal University Joan Templer achieved considerable recognition in South Africa - her native land. She began to break away from the formality of her training to experiment with abstraction. But, her strongest influence and generator was a reaction to the cruel apartheid system which forced itself into her work.

She and her family moved to New York during the late sixties where the cultural shock of New York during the Vietnam war was the strongest influence at that time reflected clearly in her paintings. Later she followed her husband to Atlanta where John and Joan both became professors at Georgia Tech. At Georgia Tech she ran a large multi-media studio for doctoral, graduate, and undergraduate students. Her mission was to encourage creativity, find new and experimental ways for the students (and herself) to express their ideas, as well as to teach theories of art, and techniques. Techniques included watercolor, oil and acrylic painting, digital computer art, and many graphic techniques such as etching, embossing, and silkscreen printing.

"This history," Joan adds, "may help to explain why my own work is so varied. For the life of me I can't repeat anything I have already completed to my own satisfaction. I'm always playing the 'what if' game with myself. What if I try this idea, this empirical construction, this technique, combined with that approach?" Experimentation through a restless dialogue between technique, material, and subject matter, informed by the content of the subconscious mind, the aesthetic control from learned theories, and technical know-how produces the imaginative results that characterize her creations. Perhaps this is something like the way composers of serious music work. As Dr. Blanche Douglas wrote in her piece Matter Matters "For artists, image creation is an exploration in which inert matter (the medium) is transformed. However, for Joan Templer, this transformation of matter into image is not the imposition of a pre-conceived, intended shape onto a compliant medium. For Joan the creative process starts with a constant exploration of the medium with no [certain] idea of image yet in mind."

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