Arts, Etc.Fine Art

Mahoney’s art illustrates love for life

Professor of Art Joella Jean Mahoney’s gregarious personality is reflected in her various paintings. By viewing her artwork, one may notice the enormous amout of spirit and emotion embodied within. Here, she is creating her latest masterpiece in the Hopi Traditions series. Mahoney has taught at the University for 32 years. / photo by Starr Carroll
Professor of Art Joella Jean Mahoney’s gregarious personality is reflected in her various paintings. By viewing her artwork, one may notice the enormous amount of spirit and emotion embodied within. Here, she is creating her latest masterpiece in the Hopi Traditions series. Mahoney has taught at the University for 32 years. / photo by Starr Carroll

by Jennifer Phillips
Staff Writer

About seven years ago, Art Professor Joella Jean Mahoney left full-time teaching at the Univer­sity of La Verne Art Department to devote more time to her professional art work. The devotion to her art is seen through the petite and lively woman’s sparkling eyes of life.

Mahoney has returned to ULV to teach only for the 1995 fall semester. Her stay will be short-lived compared to her previous 32-year teaching span at the University.

“I was asked by Ruth Trotter [associate professor of art] to come back and help with the department’s move from the Student Center to the old Kilo Building on D Street, now known as the Art Building,” said Mahoney.

She is known internationally for her large-scale oil paintings of the canyon country and of the southwest.

However, Mahoney also paints flowers, animals, still lifes and human figures.

In Sedona, her work is featured in the Mahoney Studio and Red Stone Gallery. Her paintings range in style, from representational to abstraction, inspired by her many years of hiking and backpacking in the west. Her work is popular not only in the southwest, but nationally as well. For her, being in the landscape is a spiritual experience and her paintings honor the earth.

From her mother’s love of nature and growing up in the beautiful sand dune country on Lake Michigan, she embraces the concept of nature as divinity.

Art critic Conrad Buff II says of her work, “Joella Jean Mahoney captures in her work the saturated color, the mystery and the majestic form of the desert.”

“I work in series, some names of my series are, The Inner Canyon Series, Lake Powell, The Sunflower Series and The Rush To Meaning Series,” said Mahoney.

Mahoney’s paintings from the last five years, The Rush To Meaning Series, will inaugurate the new art gallery in the Landis Academic Center, which will open in February 1996. This series is important to Mahoney’s continuing development as an artist.

“This series combines dramatic landscape shapes with powerful emotional content,” she said.

Mahoney believes that parenting and teaching are the two most important jobs there are.

“To get the next generation ready is a privilege,” she said.

It is her belief that a person who has never had art training can be successful in basic artmaking.

“Even the beginning student is proud of what they can do in art,” she said. “The act of painting for me is life affirming. It is my work and I love it.”

The encouraging professor says she has a lot of love to give.

“I love teaching and painting equally. I love my son, my dogs, my friends, hiking, traveling, entertaining, laughing and on and on,” said Mahoney.

After she has finished her obligation to the University in December, she will return to Arizona.

“When I stepped off the train in Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1951 to attend college and saw the beautiful landscape for the first time, I knew Arizona would be my home,” she said.

Mahoney will return to the University in the spring of 1997 to do what she loves—teach art.

Jennifer Phillips
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Starr Carroll
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