Bait, Fish Painting

Joanne Tarlin is a painter of abstract allegorical landscapes who creates provocative visual atmospheres juxtaposed the luscious colors of a heady scented bouquet of flowers. Her skies are reminiscent of both the 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich and the later work of the English painter JMW Turner, while her flora with their dying blooms and falling petal nod to the Dutch flower painters who symbolized mortality in the style of work known as Vanitas Still Life. For a decade she lived in Los Angeles where she studied and earned her BFA from The Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, a division of The New School for Social Research, NY. In the 1990s, Tarlin returned to Massachusetts and opened an art studio at 450 Harrison Avenue, an artists’ community in Boston. She went on to earn her MFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University in 2015. In 2020, Tarlin moved to Maine where she currently maintains a studio practice.