My Super-Talented Family Members: JoAnna Lombardi (Painter)

Stevie

Happy Sunday, dear fine readers. I was thinking. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by incredibly talented artists. And I haven't really written about them! What, why not! So today I'm going to dedicate a little time to doing just that. First up—my mom, JoAnna Lombardi.

My beautiful and talented mom started painting in her forties. First watercolors, then oils. Lots of blues and R&B musicians—she painted Stevie, Jimi, Billie Holiday, and commissioned by me, Boy George. 

Now she's in her seventies! And still beautiful and talented. She took a hiatus from painting for, I think, 12 years or so? My brother and his lovely wife started a family, and my mom was preoccupied with the kids. Her painting studio got turned into an awesome playroom. I don't get to visit often, but I drove down once when Fernando Fox ("Nando") was little. We played ALL DAY in that playroom. I had a blast. He's beautiful. He's growing up so fast, and now there's a baby brother too ("Gusto" Fox).

So the kids are getting big, and my mom has a new studio space, and she's back to painting every day. Her style has evolved into something even more poignant and charged. Her paintings are wonderful. Visit her website.

joannalombardiart.com

By the way, I made her new website last week. It took me weeks, because of typing with one hand, getting tired easily, and some degree of brain fog. That website would have taken me an afternoon 15 years ago. Thirty years ago I made her website too. I wrote her bio back then. I'll probably write a shorter one (as is the way these days) but here's the old one. Heh. Hub still had it in Dropbox!

 “Paint what you are, paint what you believe, paint what you feel” advises Ben Shahn in The Shape of Content (January 1972). 

It took years for JoAnna Lombardi, a forty-something wife and mother of two grown children, to get to a place in her life where she allowed such unfettered self-expression. From a tentative beginning in 1998, when she took a watercolor class as a last-ditch diversion during an extremely stressful time in her life, she’s now painting every day. What started as a side interest developed into such a cathartic personal experience that it became a minor obsession. “I don’t only want to paint,” she says. “I have to paint.”

JoAnna grew up in New Haven, Connecticut.  The New Haven of the fifties and sixties was a churning microcosm of blue-collar chaos, a mix of every possible ethnic group. JoAnna’s family lived meagerly on a crowded street of multi-family homes bursting with two or three generations.  With her mentally ill father in the hospital for what would be the rest of his life, her mother worked outside the home, leaving the kids with distracted, busy aunts or their angry, abusive grandmother. It wasn’t until later, as a teenager caught up in the “free love” candor of the sixties, that JoAnna understood the degree to which the people who were supposed to instill a value system had misguided her. In what should have been a colorful and beautiful neighborhood for a child to grow up, a suspicious and emotionally stingy family culture created a fear and distrust of outsiders, and a virtual moratorium on any kind of personal expression. 

“Nobody seemed to ever have an original thought,” she recalls.  Like Bluebeard’s wife, JoAnna’s curiosity was too much. As a young adult she opened the forbidden door to the music, art, and culture of all different ethnic groups. To the horror of her ethnocentric family, she learned to cook fabulous Spanish dishes, worshiped Motown and New Orleans R&B musicians, and decorated her house in African, Haitian, and Jamaican sculpture and furnishings. 

JoAnna’s watercolors give away the simplest of creative impulses: she loves the purity of human beings, and she wants to paint them at their most savage, most tender, most vulnerable. Though her collection includes the expected landscapes and flowers found in the portfolio of any emerging artist, JoAnna would rather hide those under the bed—she is compelled to share her more personal, emotionally-charged subjects. These include urban street scenes (“Street” series), jamming jazz and blues musicians (“Song” series), and horrific glimpses into human suffering (“World” series). She’s also given to total flights of fancy wherein she gets lost in a candy-colored fantasy world of strangely plumed birds and phantom beasts.

The immediately human subject matter is the first thing noticed about JoAnna’s watercolors. The next thing noticed is the colors themselves. Electric pinks and purples, lusty reds and violent yellows spark and pop from the paper.  JoAnna mixes paints with the abandon of a child just discovering the miracle of color, and in this, her fourth year painting, she’s learning to trust the drama of “pure” color. The juxtaposition of her raw human themes with bold color technique delivers the meaning of the painting straight to the heart of the viewer.  From the pink flushed cheeks of a nervous gospel singer to the black, gleaming eyes of an angry old woman, subject matter and color come together to convey pure human sensibilities, whether it be comic, dramatic, or introspective. 

For the “Song Series,” JoAnna’s main inspirations are the works of world-renowned photographers such as Francis Wolf, Bob Willoughby, and Terry Cryer. “The intent isn’t to rival the original,” she explains. “I could never do that, that isn’t art. It’s just that most of the classic musicians in those photographs are dead. I can’t take photos of them myself. I’m using the photo as a base to work from, but I infuse it with color and my own interpretation of emotion. These musicians are important to me, they mean a lot in what they play and sing. I want to help the dead to sing again.”∎

JoAnna Lombardi and pup (2025)