Joel Garten is a self-taught artist & composer. Born in Toronto in 1981  and based in New York City and Atlanta, he has been a self-taught visual artist for 10 years and a composer for 30 years. His art and music maintains an emphasis on the primacy of emotiveness and energetic expression, and therefore his work is expressive and full of energy and rhythm.

He creates his artwork intuitively in a variety of mediums, often inspired by Renaissance art, Expressionist works or motifs that he has developed. As part of his artistic process he repeats compositions over and over hundreds of times in notebooks, and then uses this obsessive engagement with the composition to execute large scale works on canvas. This iterative and intuitive method of creation is similar to his process working as composer as well.

He finds influence and inspiration by the full history of world art, from ancient cave paintings to Basquiat. He particularly cherishes the works of El Greco, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Willem de Kooning and Thornton Dial. 

He began as a composer at the age of 11, composing improvised works on the piano that were inspired by both visual art, as well as jazz and classical minimalism. Ten years ago he started creating artwork. The first phase of his work was entirely abstract. He moved from Toronto to Atlanta where he was exposed to works by Southern self-taught artists such as Thornton Dial, Mary T. Smith and Joe Light. These works inspired him to shift to figurative artwork, yet the improvisational and intuitive nature of his work that was born from his beginnings as a composer and further formulated through his engagement with abstraction remain in his artwork. In his figurative paintings he has created work that draws inspiration from Renaissance religious compositions such as triptychs and annunciations. While he draws numerous inspirations and influences from other art, his work is at its heart a deep expression of his artistic vision, one that has its basis in pure intuitive and free expression, and an engagement with a sense of energy, rhythm, motion and the uniting of line with color.

"My artistic achievement was accomplished through 10 years of very hard work. It was particularly hard because I was self-taught. I was working completely alone. I had no feedback from anyone else. No input. Nobody to teach me even the basics of what I was doing and I kept myself to that same principle through all the time that I taught myself to be an artist and through the last 10 years of work. Above all, I kept to the primacy of expressive energy and following entirely my own internal vision."

-Joel Garten

"My work began in music which is the most abstract realm of artistic expression. I then moved into abstract painting. But the spirit of abstraction remains in my paintings, where pure energy and expressiveness of the work is more important than its narrative or subject matter. I feel my artwork synthesizes the entire history of expressionism in western art. It draws on expressionistic precursors in types of artwork as diverse as neolithic cave paintings, (which i visited in Europe as a young child) and by El Greco and then carries on the realms of Van Gogh, German Expressionism, Abstract Expressionism, Neo Expressionism and Southern self-taught art. I create dots that look like Mary T. Smith, pulsating lines that look like Keith Haring. There are rhythmic raw outlines that look like Thornton Dial. There's abstract patches that bring to mind De Kooning. Well all these things are influences. I do not try to copy or imitate other art. Rather the influences are synthesized into my artistic awareness and become an inspiration for my own creations. Just as in my music, where I was influenced by lyrical jazz and dissonant classical minimalism and brought those disparate elements together in my own way; my art brings together Renaissance art, and art that was created in the American South by untrained artists. So bringing together opposites and creating a synthesis of them is one of the key elements of my artistic output .All of it is really truly my own personal artistic expression and a style and manner of working as well as as a philosophy of creation that is truly an expression of my deep creative drive. It is a type of creation that cannot be taught and therefore my personal experience as a self-taught artist is very dear to me. It is freeness and it is lyricism and it is intensity, it is flow and it is tension. It is raw emotiveness and energy." 

-Joel Garten

“I feel my art falls in the line of Expressionism starting with Post-Impressionism and ending with Neo-Expressionism in the 80s and in self-taught art in the United States in the 90s. The thing that puts my art separate from the past forms of Expressionism is that I put the emphasis purely on the energy in the art. That is the focus and that's what drives it. Previous forms of Expressionism put the emphasis on extraneous elements -- on everything other than the energy when it is truly that the energy that it was trying to express. For me the focus is purely and squarely on what is most important in Expressionism: energy.”

-Joel Garten