Laurie Gwen Shapiro on Instagram: "Spent several hours today in the marvelous, color-soaked studio of Joan Thorne--an unforgettable afternoon.

Joan is a third-generation Abstract Expressionist and a fellow native New Yorker (Little Red Schoolhouse alum—her music teacher was Pete Seeger, which tells you a lot right there). Her studio is a full-body experience: towering canvases in radiant color, paint underfoot, stories tumbling out as fast as the hues.

She paints big--bold shapes, fearless colors, but with a kind of invisible architecture beneath the surface. Nothing feels random. Everything sings, but in harmony. There’s no posturing, no art-speak. Just the joy of painting, shaped by decades of deep thinking and fearless doing.

She’s had a remarkable career, with exhibitions at the Whitney Annual, the Corcoran, and the Grand Palais in Paris. She won the Prix de Rome and even took home a painting prize at the Florence Biennale. But she doesn’t lead with any of that. She leads with cur...

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"Ms. Thorne's new, exuberantly brushy, fruit- and candy-colored canvases fit right in with the permissive pluralism of painting today."
"Optically captivating, the work conveys a state of visceral and cosmic ecstasy. "
--Ken Johnson, New York Times Review, November 26, 2010

"However passionate and fruitful her commitment to . . . modernism’s spiritual ambitions, the paintings themselves, in their structures and imagery, betray an astute and thoroughly interiorized comprehension of the challenges abstract painting has faced from midcentury to the present."
--Vittorio Colaizzi, Associate Professor of Art History at ODU, "Joan Thorne: Analytic Ecstasy" Woman’s Art Journal vol. 37, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2016): 37-45.

"The sheer quantity of color and energy could be exhausting, but never boring in such expansive canvases."
"Viewers couldn't help feeling overpowered by the movement inherent in piecing together the drama of the images."
--Ali Pechman, ArtNews Review, January 2014

"Abstract painter Joan Thorne consistently takes the risk of embracing pure expression."
"Her bright palette and sharp boundaries are musical, with large grounding masses and radiating waves swirling above them, like sound made visible in an aquarium."
"On the whole, Thorne's colors seem to produce their own light, and each layer is independent."
"This center area holds the four, distinct layers that epitomize the strongest appeal of these works: depth without illusionism."
-- Douglas Manson, Art In America, Review, April 2011

"Since 1973, while myriad styles, movements and mediums have flourished briefly in turn, Joan Thorne has steadfastly developed one visual language-that of painterly surface, light, color and distilled form-which she finds best suited for her artistic project: intimating dreams. intuitions and the psychic consequences of travel. "
"For there is something luxuriant and mysterious in Thorne's compositions. They have a classic modernist genealogy that encompasses Dove, O'Keeffe, Hartley, Avery and Tobey; yet each carries a hint of exoticism, "
--Richard Vine, Art In America, Review, June 1998

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