Joan Cox Paints Women as They See Themselves, Not Through the Male Gaze

At Women in Arts Network, for our Love, Life and Everything She Creates exhibition, we received submissions exploring love in every form imaginable. Romantic love, self-love, maternal love, love of place, love of process. And then Joan Cox sent us oil paintings of queer women in their own homes surrounded by their cats and their birds and their books and their ordinary Tuesday evening lives and we thought finally. Finally someone is painting this.

Joan is a selected artist for the Love, Life and Everything She Creates exhibition and what her work does is so simple it’s almost radical. She paints women who love women. In their kitchens. On their sofas. In parks. In bed. Not for shock value. Not to make a statement. Just existing. Comfortable with each other the way couples are comfortable after years of sharing a life.

The kind of intimacy that isn’t dramatic or performative but is just two people being themselves in the same room knowing they don’t have to explain anything to anyone. She works in oil and the medium matters because what she’s building needs time. Months on a single painting.

Layer over layer. Transparent glazes deepening the shadows. Rich buttery texture in the whites and yellows. Surfaces she sands back to reveal earlier layers underneath. These aren’t quick paintings because the relationships they hold aren’t quick relationships. The slowness of the making matches the depth of what’s being shown.

She references historical paintings in her compositions but not the way art students reference old masters. She takes intimate compositions from art history and reimagines them with queer couples in their own homes in their own lives with their own objects around them. The borrowed composition becomes something completely new because the people inside it have never been given this kind of space on a canvas before.

She’s been working with the figure for over twenty-five years. Started in watercolour and collage before moving to oil. And there’s a painting from her graduate school days that changed everything for her but we’ll let her tell you about that because the story of how she found this subject is the story of how her whole practice found its purpose.

The details in her paintings matter as much as the figures. The clothing. The interiors. The objects people surround themselves with. She paints all of it because all of it builds the story. Identity lives in those details. Who you are is in the books on your shelf and the pattern on your wallpaper and the cat sleeping on the arm of your chair and Joan captures all of it with the same care because none of it is background noise. It’s all character.

Her paintings are getting larger. Close to life-size now. Because she wants you to stand in front of these women and feel like you’re in the room with them. Not observing from a safe distance. In the room. Part of the moment. Close enough that the intimacy between two people becomes something you can almost feel on your own skin.

Now let’s hear from Joan, about painting queer love as Tuesday evenings, about borrowing art history and giving it back changed, and why ordinary might be the most radical thing on a canvas right now.

Q1. Joan, can you share a little about your background and what first led you to figurative painting?

I began exploring the figure in my work early on…but not in oil paint. I made large figurative compositions in watercolor and collage.

Q2. You have focused on intimate relationships between women for many years. When did you realize this needed to become central to your practice?

It all came together for me in graduate school when I first made a painting of myself and my partner in a borrowed composition from an artist I admired— Xenia Hausner. That painting, Nighthunger, became pivotal in my practice. I realized the power it held and wanted to explore the potential of story-telling through this type of portraiture.

Q3. Historical paintings often influence your compositions. What do you look for in an older artwork before deciding to reference or rework it?

I look for compositions that hold potential for a reimagining and that are intimate in nature. I am currently exploring Hunt’s “The Awakening” as inspiration for a new work. I asked a couple that I was photographing to recreate the pose in their own home and the resulting photograph of them is very different from the source and became entirely their own.

Q4. Your paintings include objects, interiors, clothing, and other small details around the figures. How do you use these elements to tell us more about the people in the painting?  

Those details are essential to the narrative and to revealing their personalities. I think identity is intrinsically interesting to all of us as human beings. It is the reason portraits are still popular in painting after hundreds of years. The things we surround ourselves with build the story. My newest couple are surrounded by their cats and pet birds.

Q5. Oil painting allows you to build highly detailed and emotionally layered scenes. What keeps you committed to the medium?

Oil paints bring challenges and surprises that I don’t experience in acrylics or watercolor. The ability to layer with transparent glazes is one of the most beautiful ways to deepen shadows. The rich, buttery texture of whites and yellows sing on the surface. I can also sand the work to reveal earlier layers and scratch the surface with the end of my brush to reveal colors below while creating patterns.

Q6. Your paintings can be tender, sensual, or simply mundane. Why is showing that full range of a relationship important to you?

Too often, queer relationships have been sensationalized and depicted with shock-value but the truth is our lives are full of ordinary moments and tender moments. My goal is to dispel the taboo around our relationships and celebrate them instead.

Q7. Your work includes painting, photography, and monotype. What can photography or printmaking give you that painting cannot?

Both photography and printmaking give me an immediacy that painting cannot. I spend months on my paintings but snapping a multitude of photos in minutes helps me capture those fleeting expressions and moments that are so difficult to capture. Similarly the printmaking process is relatively quick.

I paint in watercolor that is light and fluid, on a mylar surface, and then wait for it to dry. Once dry, I run it through a printing press onto the paper. The resulting prints feel light and airy and transparent, as opposed the opaque, layered oil paintings. They capture a far more ethereal moment.

Q8. Your figures often look comfortable with one another rather than posed for the viewer. How do you create that sense of familiarity between two people?

I want the paintings to feel like the viewer has just been given a glimpse into a private moment…whether the setting is a public place like a park or a domestic setting. The couples are intrinsically already comfortable with one another and I don’t over direct them when taking photographs. I talk to them a lot and ask about their relationship, their interests, their pets, how they met etc…taking pictures the whole time and every now and then prompting one or the other to give me a direct gaze.

Q9. Do you see your paintings as adding new images to art history, or also asking viewers to reconsider what has been missing from it?

I definitely see my paintings as adding to art history. Culturally, the time is now to tell our stories visually. I think those of us who have been left out of art history will connect with the work immediately and recognize that we have, in fact, been missing from it. We have steadily had more representation in film and popular music, but if you ask most queer people if they have seen themselves on museum walls, they will say no.

Q10. After more than twenty-five years of working with the figure, what has changed most in the way you approach portraiture?

My works are getting larger and larger! I aim to paint the figures close to life-size so that viewers can easily relate to them when standing in front of them and also to give them importance. I am also reveling in the intricacy of patterns and nature and have widened the compositions to include more details and symbolism.

Q11. Do you think there is a difference between being represented in art and being genuinely understood through art?

Yes, there is a clear difference. Women have been the primary subject of paintings for hundreds of years, but painted through the male gaze as objects of desire. Painting women from the female gaze and depicting our unique experiences as lesbians, gives the artwork the power to tell stories and help viewers better understand our lives.

Q12. What advice would you give to artists who want to make honest work about their own communities but feel uncertain about how it will be received?

Seek out peers to share your work with if you are unsure how it will be received. If you do not live in a very liberal place, look for online communities of artists. I participate in collectives where I can share my ideas and my works in progress on a regular basis. I meet weekly over zoom with artists from around the world.

As we wrapped our conversation with Joan, one thought kept circling back. That queer women have been left out of art history for centuries. That if you walk through most museums in the world you will not see yourself on those walls if you are a woman who loves women. You’ll see women painted by men as objects of desire.

You’ll see the male gaze deciding what female intimacy looks like. But you will almost never see two women together in their own home on their own terms painted by someone who actually understands what that life looks like from the inside.

Joan is changing that. One painting at a time. Getting larger every year. Closer to life-size. More detailed. More intimate. More unapologetically ordinary. Because that’s the revolution in her work. Not the queerness. The ordinariness. The Tuesday evening. The cat on the couch. The coffee getting cold on the table.

The way one person leans against the other without thinking about it because that’s just where their body goes. Painting that without fanfare, without explanation, without asking permission, that’s how you add something to art history that should have been there all along.

We think about representation a lot in the art world but Joan made us think about it differently. There’s a difference between being represented in art and being understood through art. Representation says you exist. Understanding says this is what your life actually feels like from the inside. Joan’s paintings do the second thing and that’s what makes them matter beyond the art world, beyond exhibitions, beyond any conversation about diversity or inclusion.

They matter because a queer woman can stand in front of one and for the first time see her own ordinary beautiful unremarkable life on a canvas painted with the same care and craft and seriousness that art history has always given to everyone else’s love stories.

For anyone thinking about collecting Joan’s work, understand what you’re bringing into your home. Not a political statement. Not activism dressed as art. A love story. Painted in oil over months with transparent glazes and buttery whites and every detail chosen because it tells you something about the people in the frame. The kind of painting that rewards closeness because Joan built it for closeness. And the kind of painting that will mean more in twenty years than it does today because the world is slowly catching up to what Joan has been saying with her brush for a quarter of a century.

To follow Joan’s journey and see more of her work, find her through the links below.