The University of La Verne is pleased to present “Joella Jean Mahoney: Passionate Vision: Landscape Painting of the Colorado Plateau, 1965-2016”. The fifty year retrospective honors Professor of Art Emerita Joella Mahoney and is part of the university’s 125th Anniversary Celebration. Mahoney’s work is internationally known through the Art in the Embassies Program, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Her work has been in numerous national and international exhibits including recent retrospectives at the Kolb Museum, West Valley Art Museum in Phoenix, AZ, Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff. Her paintings are held in many public and private collections.
“Although Joella Jean Mahoney is famous for being a Southwestern landscape painter, I would describe her as an artist who documents energy becoming form, and who just happens to do this in Arizona, primarily. In three series, the Southwest Landscape Series, the Inner Canyon Series, and, especially, the Rush to Meaning Series, she paints the artistic equivalent of the Big Bang; these paintings are fractals of it, and they resonate far beyond the canvas, just as the original energy is still expanding. We are so transient on this earth that we never see the change and movement that is going on before our very eyes, but, somehow, Mahoney intuits it and paints it.” – Dr. Elizabeth Oakes