About
JoAnn Chartier is an artist who layers ideas about geology, physics and history into her paintings and prints. Working in series over the years she has explored creation myths, plate tectonics, string theory and delved into the mental/emotional landscapes of ordinary life. In the Creation Myth series she digs into muti-cultural histories for stories about beginnings; in the Journey series she probes dreams and popular culture to discover personal landscapes; and, most recently, in Alternate Realities, she wonders what theoretical physics, minus the math equations, would look like in paint on canvas.
Chartier has shown her work in the Northwest since 1978. She has been a featured artist in Oregon at Dragonfire Gallery in Cannon Beach since 2009, and her paintings in 2011's Paper Stone Canvas exhibit at the Hult Center's Jacobs Gallery, Eugene, Oregon drew a large audience. Reviewer Bob Keefer said "Her big, colorful and complex landscapes are inspired by sources as intellectual as string theory and as down to earth as the stark expanses of Eastern Oregon." She has been included in numerous invitational and competitive exhibits and won a number of awards, including Bronze Awards in both traditional and in contemporary painting at the 1995 California Discovery show, and in 2000, a purchase award for the Eric Rood Administrative Center, Nevada County, California.
Chartier earned a degree with honors from California State University Sacramento, working with Steve Kaltenbach in ceramics and Jack Ogdon in painting; she studied printmaking with John Hamilton and painting with Pam Johnson at Sierra College, where she had her first solo show of prints and paintings in the college gallery. She has taught painting through Adult Education classes and to private students. Her work was featured in the spring 2008 edition of Jerry Williams' quARTerly art magazine with a five-page pictorial.
In addition to her life-long painting career, Chartier is co-author of four non-fiction books about women in the old west published by Globe Pequot/Falcon Books, and earned recognition as a newspaper and broadcast reporter and talk show host, winning awards from Associated Press and the Radio and Television News Directors Association. She retired to Oregon in 2005 to take up her brushes and paint full time.