How Storytelling Became Part of Joanna Blair’s Art Practice

Joanna Blair’s paintings have always carried a sense of story.

Even before there was a written narrative attached to them, the figures, florals, interiors and symbolic details seemed to suggest a world beyond the edge of the paper. The viewer was invited to wonder who the woman was, what she had lived through, what she was remembering, and what moment of change she had entered.

Over time, that instinctive sense of story became more deliberate.

Joanna’s current body of work is connected to her Substack publication, The Turning Point — an ongoing fictional narrative that unfolds alongside her paintings. Rather than existing separately, the written and visual worlds now speak to one another.

A painting may inspire a scene.
A character may inspire a painting.
A symbolic object may move from the story into the artwork.
A flower, fan, perfume bottle, pearl or hidden key may carry meaning across both.

This has allowed Joanna’s work to become more layered. Each painting can still stand entirely on its own as an original artwork, but it may also belong to a larger emotional world. For collectors, this creates a deeper relationship with the piece. They are not only acquiring an image; they are entering a world of beauty, symbolism and becoming.

Storytelling also allows Joanna to explore the interior life of women with greater depth. Her paintings often capture a moment of transformation, while the writing gives room to expand the emotional atmosphere around that moment.

Together, the art and story create something more immersive.

This is not illustration in the traditional sense. The paintings are not simply showing scenes from a story. Instead, they are fragments of a larger world — visual thresholds, emotional clues, objects of memory and symbols of change.

For Joanna, storytelling has become a natural extension of painting.

Both are ways of asking the same question:

What happens when a woman begins to recognise who she truly is?