Lisa Joy Newcomb

Lisa Joy Newcomb creates photographic abstractions from layered fabrics, glass, and found objects, using natural light to transform physical assemblages into images of color, movement, and reflective depth. She considers the arrangement and the photograph inseparable. The construction establishes the visual relationships, while the camera captures the moment when light activates them.

Newcomb calls these works her “Joyful Abstracts.” Their fluid forms and saturated colors are intended to create calm without becoming passive. Beneath their visual optimism lies a practice shaped by delayed opportunity, lifelong learning, environmental awareness, and a return to art at the age of sixty-five.

Her artistic history begins before her birth. Newcomb’s maternal grandfather lost his parents and two siblings by the age of sixteen, many of them to the Spanish flu. The economic instability that followed, intensified by the Depression, made financial security his overriding concern. He believed that pursuing art meant becoming “a bum in the attic,” a view shared by Newcomb’s grandmother.

These fears limited the possibilities available to the next generation. Newcomb’s mother and uncle both wanted to attend college and study art but were not permitted to do so. Her mother eventually persuaded her parents to allow her to study business, only to encounter additional resistance at college. A professor publicly accused her of taking a seat that should have gone to a returning serviceman. Pressured by both family and faculty, she was unable to pursue the intellectual and creative life she had imagined.

When Newcomb showed an interest in art, her mother responded differently. Growing up near Philadelphia, she was driven to classes at the Cheltenham Art Center and attended Lighthouse Art and Music Camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her mother wanted to provide the opportunities that had been withheld from her.

Color became an early fascination. Newcomb accompanied her mother to fabric stores and learned to distinguish subtle variations within a hue, identifying when a blue carried too much green or an orange too much red. Her uncle gave her an easel, paper, clips, and tempera paint, then introduced her to the color wheel. Mixing pigments and discovering new colors became more compelling than committing to any single form.

Newcomb attended a progressive public high school where she majored in art. She later enrolled at Emerson College, which then maintained a relationship with the Museum School in Boston. During her second year, she began traveling by trolley between the institutions for studio courses. The schedule frequently caused her to arrive after assignments had been explained. Midway through the semester, Emerson announced that the Museum School program would be discontinued, abruptly ending her formal college-level training in fine art.

Art remained present, but it moved through other areas of her life. As a realtor for approximately fourteen years, Newcomb used her understanding of spatial relationships, color, and design to help clients imagine themselves within unfamiliar homes. When a difficult economy and high interest rates slowed the real estate market, she returned to school and earned a Master of Social Work.

During graduate school and for several years afterward, Newcomb lived across the street from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She attended its free weekly hours as often as possible, continuing an education built through close and repeated encounters with art.

At forty, she married and moved to the Deep South. Preparing to become a mother at forty-two, Newcomb began visiting children’s museums, science centers, and early childhood programs while accompanying her husband on work trips. She later wrote a proposal that secured seed funding for a needs assessment for a children’s museum in Jackson, Mississippi. The museum was constructed several years later.

Subsequent moves took the family to Pensacola, Florida, and Montgomery, Alabama. In Pensacola, Newcomb enrolled her daughter in a class at the Pensacola Museum of Art and began volunteering as a docent. At the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, she found a sustained intellectual community and served as an active docent for twelve years.

Weekly training sessions with curators, educators, scholars, and visiting artists became an informal but rigorous education in American art. Newcomb especially valued giving tours to children, whose direct questions encouraged her to continue learning. She also visited museums throughout the United States, encountered art during travel in Europe, and later joined a weekly virtual abstract art course through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Delaware.

Her return to making art began unexpectedly during the COVID-19 pandemic. A friend gave her a scarf at a time when she had nowhere to wear it. Newcomb placed the textile beneath a glass centerpiece on her dining room table. Each time she sat down, she moved the glass across the fabric and watched the patterns change through refraction, shifting light, and altered perspective.

That modest experiment became the foundation of her current practice.

At sixty-five, Newcomb began gathering scarves she had worn alongside glass objects she had inherited or collected. She arranged them together and photographed the results outdoors when the light was favorable, sometimes working twice in one day. A slight change in the position of a glass form or the replacement of one textile with another could reorganize the entire composition.

Rather than feeling isolated during the pandemic, she became absorbed in this new method. Within a year, she received first place in photography at a local collective gallery for an image fittingly titled In the Beginning.

Newcomb’s process remains intentionally simple in its equipment but highly attentive in its execution. She works at a small table on the balcony of her Florida condo, relying on natural light. Reflectors placed between the table and railing redirect illumination, and she occasionally holds another above the arrangement to alter its direction.

The most productive conditions occur early in the morning or late in the afternoon, when the light is soft. Her husband often prepares breakfast or dinner while she works outside, allowing her to follow the limited window of illumination without interruption.

A session may begin with a concept prompted by an exhibition theme, an event in the news, or a condition within her immediate environment. At other times, the materials lead. Newcomb may select a patterned fabric first and search for glass capable of extending its movement. When that approach becomes too familiar, she reverses the sequence and begins with glass, allowing its transparency, curvature, and color to determine what follows.

She photographs each arrangement with a cell phone, often taking several dozen images before reviewing them on an iPad. She then returns to the balcony, adjusts the materials or reflectors, and photographs again. A single session may produce between one hundred and one hundred fifty images, only a small number of which proceed to editing.

The editing remains restrained. Newcomb may shift color values, adjust depth of field, or crop the frame to strengthen balance. She is interested in integration rather than transformation. The final image must preserve the physical encounter among glass, textile, object, and light.

When a photograph appears complete, she lives with it before assigning a title. The name is not imposed as an explanation. She waits for the image to establish its emotional character and, in her words, allows it to speak to her.

Water has shaped the way Newcomb sees light throughout her life. She spent part of her childhood along the South Jersey shore, later lived near New England coastlines and beside a bayou, and now resides near a Florida bay close to the Gulf. From her balcony, she watches sunlight scatter across the water, observing its movement, instability, and reflective force.

The light she once searched for across the ocean’s surface now appears within glass and fabric. To preserve its clarity and intensity, Newcomb typically prints her photographs on high-definition aluminum, a surface that reinforces luminosity and saturated color.

Her influences include Miriam Schapiro, Georgia O’Keeffe, glass artist Stephen Rolfe Powell, and photographer Susan Ressler. Schapiro’s Pattern and Decoration work affirmed fabric as a serious visual material and encouraged Newcomb’s embrace of color and pattern. O’Keeffe demonstrated how close observation and cropping could move a recognizable form toward abstraction. Powell’s glass revealed how solid material could retain an impression of fluidity, while Ressler provided technical guidance, critical attention, and encouragement to pursue exhibitions.

Newcomb’s work also reflects her career as a therapist. Years spent listening to experiences of pain and difficulty convinced her that being heard can contribute meaningfully to healing. Her abstractions do not narrate those individual histories, but they are designed to create an environment of calm, openness, and emotional possibility.

This orientation does not prevent more difficult subjects from entering the work. In Climate Shift, Newcomb considers the destructive capacities of water and fire alongside their visual beauty. Having lived through major hurricanes, she understands the force of water directly. The image acknowledges environmental danger while retaining her characteristic emphasis on hope and the possibility of response.

Newcomb does not approach such concerns through visual aggression. Her method is quieter. Serious content enters through color, title, association, and the tension among elements rather than through direct confrontation.

Collaboration has recently expanded that language. Initially hesitant about entering the Celebration of Women: Collaborations Juried Exhibit, Newcomb reconsidered and partnered with an abstract painter and two fused-glass artists. The group exchanged ideas through screen sharing, email, telephone conversations, critiques, and in-person meetings.

Together, they produced three works involving different combinations of the four artists. Immense Possibilities, created by all four women, received first place for Cross Disciplinary Collaboration. For Newcomb, the project demonstrated that collaboration could produce visual energy and formal relationships unavailable to any participant working alone.

The experience also challenged a pattern of self-limitation. For more than forty-five years, Newcomb believed she could no longer make art at the level she had reached in adolescence and early adulthood. Her drawing and painting skills had changed, and embarrassment about that distance discouraged her from returning.

Her present practice required abandoning the expectation that artistic recovery meant reproducing an earlier ability. She did not regain the same method. She found another one.

Newcomb now sees herself as a more knowledgeable and purposeful artist than she was when technical skill came more easily. Decades of museum work, close looking, professional experience, travel, and study have clarified her visual judgment. The result is not a return to an earlier identity, but the development of a distinct mature voice.

Recognition has followed. Within six years of returning to art, Newcomb received a Best of Show award and multiple placements in photography and abstract photography. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions, museums, galleries, publications, public spaces, and large-scale digital displays. She remains grateful for these honors but views them as secondary to the discovery that a serious artistic life can begin at any age.

Newcomb is equally attentive to the less visible labor required to sustain that life. Applications, exhibition preparation, editing, documentation, and public communication are integrated into her daily routine. She commits to pursuing new opportunities each month, treating the application process as another form of critique that requires her to clarify and strengthen the work.

For Newcomb, art intended to encourage reflection or lift another person’s spirits must enter public view. Remaining private would prevent the work from fulfilling its purpose. Sharing becomes part of making.

Her practice therefore brings together several kinds of construction: the physical arrangement of fabrics and glass, the photographic organization of color and light, and the deliberate creation of a public life for the finished image. Each requires patience, adjustment, and a willingness to reconsider what an artistic career can look like.

Newcomb’s trajectory does not follow a direct line from childhood talent to professional practice. It moves through family history, interrupted education, real estate, social work, museums, motherhood, relocation, and decades of close observation. The work that emerged at sixty-five carries all of those experiences without illustrating them literally.

In her photographs, light passes through objects that have already lived within her home and history. Scarves become fields of pattern. Glass distorts and clarifies at once. The camera records not only their arrangement, but the discovery of a creative language that was delayed without being lost.