About
Joshua Field is a contemporary narrative painter exploring themes including isolation, sexuality and conflict, using a diverse variety of media including charcoal, gold leaf, oil, gouache and acrylic. Field holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD and a degree from the Pinellas County Center for the Arts in St. Petersburg, FL.Field attended a high school for the arts (Pinellas County Center for the Arts) in St. Petersburg, Florida. Upon admission, he entered an intensely creative environment, an experience that formed his classical foundation. He was influenced by what is often called the proto-pop movement, a time when abstract expressionism clashed with the introduction of the ready-made, found object and assimilated commercial imagery of the pop movement. Florida’s gulf coast is a haven for the proto-pop elite, including Robert Rauschenberg and James Rosenquist.
Joshua then attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore where he expanded his education. At MICA, he focused on assemblage/collage and poetry, and was mentored by Joe Cardarelli, a renowned beat poet and friend of Alan Ginsberg, Andrei Codrescu, Anselm Hollo and Robert Creeley. Field connected readily with poetry as the assembly of text to create alternative narrative structures is an ideal analogue for narrative symbolic imagery.
After graduating a semester early in 1996, Joshua moved to the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, which was quickly becoming a Mecca for the visual arts. He established a studio in the the town of North Adams, Massachusetts, where the largest contemporary art museum on the east coast, MassMoCA, had just opened. There, he began a long involvement with the Contemporary Artists Center which began as a studio residency and eventually led to Field presiding over the CAC’s board of directors. Field currently lives and works in North Adams, MA and maintains a studio at the Historic Windsor Mill.
