JOE GARCIA had an his exhibition, Entwined, at the Santa Ysabel Art Gallery, April 8 through June 4, 2017 This was an one person show featuring the art of internationally known San Diego County painter Joe Garcia. On exhibit was Garcia’s landscape and wildlife paintings in oil and in watercolor. Entwined, as an exhibit title, refers to the connectedness of the artist’s favorite subjects to paint, that is, wildlife, habitat and landscape.
A native Californian, Joe Garcia grew up on a small ranch near Escondido, California where he developed an exceptional awareness of wildlife and habitat. He studied illustration at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles and worked as an illustrator before deciding in 1983 to make fine art his primary focus. With this change of interest to fine art, Garcia took a step that would later turn out to be key to his career as a painter of wildlife. He built an aviary for various types of quail with the intent of drawing, painting and photographing them. He would go into this habitat and sit with the birds, eventually learning to draw and paint each quail type accurately and with feeling.
Garcia’s fame as a painter of birds grew, and was spread, in large part, due to his quail studies and to the early paintings that he did of the birds in his aviary.
Garcia’s work has appeared in the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum’s Birds in Art exhibition in Wausau, Wisconsin and in the permanent collection of the Bennington Center for the Arts in Vermont. He exhibits annually in the major nature oriented art festivals throughout the United States and has been a demonstration artist for the PBS television series “The Artist’s Workshop”.
Garcia is as acclaimed for his landscape paintings as he is for his wildlife work. He is also very well known as a teacher of watercolor painting in this country and overseas. Joe Garcia is the author of The Watercolor Bible and Mastering the Watercolor Wash, now art book classics, and the recent Secrets of Watercolor, all published by North Light Books. He has been featured in numerous art books and magazines and has written a major article for the publication Watercolor Magic.
In recent years, traveling to photograph painting reference has become an enjoyable and adventurous part of the painting experience for Garcia. In addition to taking photos he has been traveling and teaching painting workshops in the United States and in Greece, Italy, France and New Zealand. Joe Garcia lives in Julian, California with his artist wife Anne, where the oaks and pines support an abundance of wildlife, a good place for an artist with a specialty in painting creatures and habitat.