JoyKo is the creation of Chicago artists Rachel Joyce and Karen Sako, artists who collaborate together to create unique, abstract, mixed media, oil & cold wax paintings. After years of working together and sharing studio space we decided to join forces to bring our collectors beautiful and affordable original art.
JoyKo began with the idea of creating small works, but painting them at the same time. This way we could complete upwards of 40 cohesive paintings in one studio session. While we enjoyed this process and have repeated it a couple of times since our first series, it was eventually decided that we needed to work larger. We have since created works ranging as small as 4×4 all the way up 36×70!
Our process is very intuitive and playful throughout, whether we are working on one large canvas or multiple smaller pieces at a time. Our goal, aside from making beautiful artwork, is to have fun; naturally we blast music and “smoke” candy cigarettes whenever we paint together.
Initially there is a lot of mark making, typically with charcoal or graphite along with splashing and pushing paint around just to get a base coverage on the canvas. We are constantly rotating around the canvas so that neither of us gets stuck working in the same area as we intuitively continue adding paint working the piece as a whole. Layer after layer a design starts to emerge. Once we feel there’s enough paint we view the pieces individually and start the editing phase where we give each piece their finishing touches!
Commissions are available upon request.
You can purchase JoyKo merch here at Fine Art America
