Where ART Lives Magazine Volume 1 Number 4 | Page 58

Out
Side
The
House Artist Eric Joyner enjoyed a rather uneventful

childhood in the rather unremarkable town of San
Mateo, California in the 1970s. Like many kids of that
time, he enjoyed reading comics, playing sports, and
making gunpowder … wait. Gunpowder? Oh, that’s
right. This is the 1970s we’re talking about. Kids were
doing all sorts of dangerous things back then, and
nobody ever blinked an eye.
Joyner’s mother was a Methodist who would bribe her
young son with donuts to go to Sunday school. His
father, an atheist, said mean stuff about Jesus behind
his wife’s back. Despite their differences of opinion
on God, the Joyner’s built a loving home for their
children and nobody grew up to be too weird.
At some point in his very young life, someone took
Joyner to view an exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings
at the De Young museum in San Francisco. This experience greatly impressed the child, and he soon began
taking painting lessons with his older sister. By the
time he was in the first grade, classmates and teachers
started to notice the compelling work he was creating,
and the life of an artist began to take its shape.
After high school, Joyner attended the Academy of Art
in San Francisco. Later, under the influential teaching
of Francis Livingston, Kazuhiko Sano, Bill Sanchez,
and Robert Hunt, his work greatly improved and he
began to work professionally as an artist. For the next
decade, Joyner was a hired-gun for various publishers, high-tech companies, and advertising agencies; he
also was a digital animator and provided other artistic
services for a variety of companies before rediscovering his original love of drawing and painting and
returning to that medium.

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https://ericjoyner.com