Joanna Powell - 'The Piper'

Framed: 58cm x 48cm

Oil on board

Joanna Powell is an artist specialising in paintings of folk musicians. She lives and works at Sunderland Point, Lancashire, a small fishing village which can only be reached by a causeway, cut off by the tide twice a day.

Joanna studied Fine Art at the Storey Institute, Lancaster, before moving to Scotland, where she became immersed in the rich musical culture, both as a musician and an artist. After bringing up her family in Scotland, she moved back down to Lancashire in 2015.

As a musician herself and frequenter of music sessions, she has been surrounded by musicians for most of her life, especially with Scotland's rich tradition for traditional music. She spends her spare time, (when not playing her accordion), sketching fellow musicians. These sketches are then transferred to canvas and worked in oils to try and capture the love every musician feels towards their instrument and the magical world they enter when they become "lost" in the music, and the strange contorted positions they end up in whilst playing. She is primarily interested in the shapes musicians make, the juxtaposition of shapes when they play together and the space created between them.