For Leigh Karen Joyce, art is not just about creative expression, it’s something deeper. She describes art as an exchange where “just as much as I put into it, it gives back to me”.
“I’m a really healthy, happy person and I just think painting has a lot to do with it,” she says.
The living room of her Sunshine Beach home looks like an art gallery. Gracing the walls is an eclectic collection of vibrant paintings. There’s not one inch of white space to spare. Some paintings are Leigh’s, some are her mother-in-law’s, who resides in Bali, and some are the works of other artists. Collectively, they make one feel, well, happy, upbeat.
“I like art that’s happy, colourful, just something that makes me smile.”
Happiness is a theme Leigh returns to time and again during our conversation. She’s two years into retirement, but has no desire to slow down. Most days she paints for up to five hours at her home studio listening to Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles and “any kind of music, really”.
“My playlist has five days’ worth of [song] rotations,” she laughs.
Leigh’s style is difficult to define. Rather than one picture or idea consuming an entire canvas, there are typically lots of little “boxed” pictures all tied together thematically. Instead of committing to a single image across a canvas, Leigh creates smaller worlds within one larger work.
“I divide the canvas into squares or rectangles and I just do different pictures in each,” she explains.
“I’ll pick a subject, like the sea, and just go for it until I finish it.”
Leigh works largely from imagination, conceding she does use reference images if she needs to study what a seagull or feathers look like. Typically, it takes a couple of months to complete one painting.
Leigh points to what seems to be an exception to her patchwork-like style. It’s a large abstract-looking painting of Australian botanicals.
“If I’m painting a big picture, like the botanicals, I’ll start in the bottom corner and just move until it engulfs the whole canvas.”
Looking at Leigh’s art is like entering an enchanting dream: mermaids and sea creatures, fairies and woodland animals, elves and angels. It’s like pictorially describing a utopian fairytale. A sense of joy – almost childlike, generous and deeply felt – runs through every aspect of her singular creations. Her process, it would seem, is wholly intuitive.
“I just love painting,” she exclaims. “I can’t not paint. I have to paint. It just brings me joy and I think that emotion goes into my paintings. My paintings are really joyful, they have a really good feeling about them.”
In an art world often dominated by concept and intellectual framing, Leigh’s paintings offer something more instinctive: emotion, warmth and wonder.
Leigh is not being disingenuous when she says: “I don’t know what my style is because it’s kind of different I think”. She bandies a few words around: whimsical, folky, naïve and magical.
“I don’t do it [art] properly,” she says candidly. “Backgrounds are supposed to be painted first, but I usually do them last. I’ve tried doing it the correct way, but it just doesn’t work for me.”
There is freedom in that honesty – an artist unconcerned with rules or artistic orthodoxy. Leigh is entirely self-taught and refreshingly unpretentious about it.
“I know artists have ways to describe their art, but I don’t even have those words,” she says. “For me it’s an expression.”
Raised in Cronulla by an artistic mother who drew and painted, creativity arrived naturally. Leigh painted throughout childhood and school years, preferring art to sport.
“There’s something about the little girl in all of us,” she reflects. “I’ve been painting ever since I was a child. It’s just something I’ve always done.”
That childlike sensibility still guides her work today, particularly in paintings created for children’s rooms. “I love being a child again,” she says of the process.
Leigh’s relationship with painting is less about career ambition than emotional necessity. Even after retiring from a long career in fashion boutiques in Hastings Street and Peregian Square, she still feels compelled to paint almost daily.
“When I was working, I’d be dying to paint and I’d just go for it,” she says. “Now I might do five hours a day. I put my music on in my studio and I’m happy.”
Painting, she explains, creates a state that feels close to meditation.
“You can look at the clock when you start painting and then I turn around and look at the clock again and it’s like two hours have gone by and it feels like 20 minutes.”
That meditative immersion may explain the emotional atmosphere viewers often respond to in her work. For Leigh, the real success of a painting has little to do with galleries, sales or prestige. Although she has sold and exhibited through Melbourne galleries and now exclusively sells through Hearts and Minds Art in Noosa, commercial pressure has never sat comfortably with her.
“I found it really confronting to have to paint a certain amount of paintings in a certain amount of time,” she says of exhibition deadlines. “I really didn’t enjoy it.”
In fact, many of her paintings never enter the marketplace at all.
“I give away a lot of my paintings,” she says. “If a painting comes back to me, I’ll give it to a friend for a 60th birthday and just move it on.”
She seems genuinely pleased, surprised even, if recipients appreciate her art.
“For me, honestly, it’s not about the money,” she says. “I always just think, someone actually loves my painting.”
What matters most to Leigh is emotional connection. “It’s about giving someone a painting and they cry. That is what I look for.”
Hearts and Minds Art owners Julie Holland and Greg Peeler say Leigh’s art has long captivated visitors to their gallery.
“Gosh, what a diverse artist she is,” says Julie. “We have loved showing Leigh’s work in our gallery for many years. Her acrylics are often mistaken by customers for weavings, they are so textured and detailed.”
Working exclusively in acrylics, Leigh creates texture by scratching into wet paint using cut-up bank cards, toothpicks and the ends of paintbrushes.
The result is work layered with intricate detail and vibrant colour, influenced as much by Mexican folk art and Indigenous dot painting as by European religious iconography.
Following a recent trip through Italy, Leigh became captivated once again by images of the Virgin Mary.
“I’d say I’m a spiritual person but I do love Mary though,” she says. “Something speaks to me about her. I just think she’s beautiful.”
And at an age when many of her contemporaries begin slowing down, Leigh speaks instead about longevity – and gratitude.
“What’s so great about painting is you could be 90 and still paint,” she says. “If I die with a paintbrush in my hand, I’ll be real happy.
For an artist so devoted to joy, it feels less like a dramatic statement than a simple truth.
Painting is not merely what Leigh does. It is how she moves through the world – with colour, generosity, imagination and heart.