Joyce Yamada

I have a strong connection to the natural world. For many years my distress and anger at the damage we humans are doing to Earth’s animals and ecosystems has been an undercurrent in my work that I could not escape but did not want to deliberately spotlight. Bad news repels people. Now that our climate is turning dangerously unstable and the human cause of this is widely known, I can take a new path.  My current wish is to celebrate Earth’s animals, plants, and ecologies, reveling in sheer visual beauty and complexity.

I attended the San Francisco Art Institute where I embraced the message that each of us is responsible for teaching ourselves, exploring and creating our own unique bodies of work. When faced with making a living I opted to do so in medicine rather than in the art world; I am an M.D. with board certification in Diagnostic Radiology. Since the late 1980’s most years I was able to work one week as a physician followed by one week of work as an artist.  I quit medicine in 2004 to paint fulltime. I moved to New York City in 2006 where I have lived and worked ever since.

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