My paintings are part of a story about my journey as an aging woman reconnecting to my artistic, creative process which I had put aside for many years. I had majored in art in college and graduate school, taught art for awhile, got married, became involved as founder of Our Bodies Ourselves project, had two wonderful sons, went to social work school and worked in the field of aging and with Our Bodies Ourselves. I didn’t miss art. Some years ago I had a yearning to get back to art in an authentic way at this stage in my life. I went to Kripalu in the Berkshires for a yoga and landscape, watercolor painting retreat, feeling that I needed to return to art thru a kinesthetic experience in nature. By breathing deeply, being in the moment I began to find my authentic way to respond to the visual world with watercolors and I was launched. I started taking watercolor courses at the Cambridge Adult Education Center with Gary Tucker. I have subsequently been studying with Janet Hobbs and am part of a NOCA crit group .Over the years I have deepened and feel increasingly familiar with my response and visual connection to the natural world. The changing seasons, food and flowers, the changing landscape, sky, clouds and light are a flow of unique visual moments. I feel that I am in conversation with the paint, paper and the visual, sensory world and I, in the moment, am responding sometimes realistically sometimes and abstractly, capturing the moment of ‘now’. This inner urge to paint feels like a more authentic, core response than it did in the early days. I am delighted to have reclaimed it at this stage in my life. I know that it will sustain me for the rest of my life. Where this will lead I do not know, but I am on an artistic journey which is an essential part of my sense vitality and well being. 


- Joan Ditzion