Artist: Ġoxwa
via Axelle Fine Arts:
Ġoxwa, with a dot over the G, pronounced Joshwa, is the Old Maltese form of Josephine. Malta is the crossroads of the Mediterranean and look anywhere with the inquisitive eyes of an aspiring artist and you will find traces of all the wandering peoples that have come here on their way to bigger conquests or have stayed here to scratch a living out of the stony soil and build walls and paint pictures and fight each other and die.
The walls of the narrow rectilinear streets of Valletta were ideal ones to grow up with. Surrounding stones were fragments fallen off the weathered battered but still upright walls of neolithic temples which are the oldest freestanding buildings to be found anywhere on earth.
Goxwa was always sketching, from the day when, aged five, she saw a nun painting a portrait of the Virgin in a church wall. Later she went to art school for four years, though she prudently also took courses in fashion design, which she hated. Her parents, however, had other plans for her, they had arranged an ideal marriage for her with the son of a wealthy landowner, so she promptly ran away from home and caught the night plane for London. There she enrolled at St Martins Art School, took odd jobs in restaurants and in fashion design.
Returning from a nightmare vacation in Italy, she spotted and was spotted by, a handsome young man at the Genoa airport, and by the time they reached London they were in love. He later came back to London, and they got married and he took her to MIT, Goxwa waited on tables in well-known restaurants, she studied directing at Emerson College, she worked on a documentary film about the Amazon rain forest, And all the while she was painting, good art-student work which began to attract some attention — her first show was in Boston in 1985 – and eventually in 1993 she won a scholarship for a year at the Cité des Arts in Paris.
A series of lucky chances beginning with her finding a home in the old studio of Pierre Tal-Coat in the 14th arrondissement with all the magic carpet of the roofs of Paris spread out before her. And there she has been working away ever since, quietly, determinedly, untouched by local cliques or fashions, developing a personal distinctive style, dynamic patterns of colors that seem both subdued and extravagant, earthbound and winging away to an unknown direction, perky and deadly serious.
Walls, she says, are like masks, simultaneously concealing and revealing the living beings behind them. The backgrounds of her paintings are mottled with splashes of color and seemingly disordered scratchings, These are the walls. And looming out of each them are figures, faces, trees, bowls of fruit, sometimes cracked and spattered, but all of them unmistakable, individual. They may be portraits of old friends or of a dear dead cat. They may be reminiscences of paintings in museums, of Byzantine or Russian icons. But they all have that double nature which it is this artist’s special gift to illustrate.
Today’s painting may be pastoral, elysian; tomorrow’s may be ferociously witty. Over the last quiet determined decade, she has developed a mature style, which seems like a happy marriage of Mediterranean tradition and modern sensibility. She paints with a wax-and-oil-based medium, which demands rapidity of execution because the paint dries quickly. It also a more solid-looking coat of paint, one which suggests the permanence of a wall, and permits a richness and a liveliness of color that recalls both ancient Mediterranean art and modern Mediterranean scenery. They all have all had their own separate histories in the hurly-burly of mortal life, and they all also hover in another timeless world where past and present and future are one.
