ARTFULLY yours
BY DAN CRAIG
W
JoAnne Perez Robinson
Picture This
PHOTOS
orking off her own photos,
shot with a painter’s eye for
framing and composition,
Joanne skillfully applies her
vision onto the canvas. The light
source is deftly revealed in reflections and defined
in shadows, depicting glassy surfaces and folds in
clothing not nearly as fetching in the photos as they
are in her treatments.
“I don’t specialize in one subject,” she said. “I
like to capture moments and feelings from everyday
life.” The youngest of five children born to Marianna
and Raymond Perez in San Carlos, California, she
remembers wanting to be an artist since “picking up
her first crayon” and recalls “no scrap of paper has
ever been safe around me.” She moved to Gilroy as
a young adult in 1979 for the “small town vibe” and
never left. When her daughter was born in 1996,
Joanne began thinking her art would be a great way
to work from home. The turning point occurred
in 2006 when she won the Gilroy Garlic Festival
poster contest, inspiring her to make a go of it as
a full-time commercial artist in 2008. Notably, she
followed up the Garlic Festival win with second-
place in 2008 and 2010, and another first in 2011.
“I have a great family,” she wrote on her website
bio, including “my very supportive husband, Mike,
son Sam, daughter Kyle, and my constant (studio)
companion, Lucy, the pug.”
It is said that every picture tells a story. And what
a story Gilroy contemporary artist JoAnne Perez
Robinson tells in her acrylic paintings, finding
subtleties and nuances not evident to the casual
viewer. The results are imaginative and engaging.
Anyone viewing her art will surely picture a storied
future for JoAnne Perez Robinson.
Dan Craig is a local artist
whose early works were in
the Realism style. He now
enjoys an Impressionistic
style. He lives in Morgan
Hill with his life partner, Kim.
78
GILROY • MORGAN HILL • SAN MARTIN
JULY/AUGUST 2017
gmhtoday.com