Between Desire and Vulnerability
Interview with Joanna Bavero
1. Please tell us something about your background and your art journey so far.
I’ve been an artist for as long as I can remember. As a child I was drawing constantly and the only thing I was really interested in drawing was people. In 2007 I received a BFA from Savannah College of Art & Design with a concentration in Painting, where I learned the fundamentals of oil painting process and technique. In 2014 I received my MFA from Stony Brook University where for three years I explored thematically what I was trying to say through my art and developing the process that I still use today. The process and materials that I use are unique to my art practice and I am not aware of any other artists who work in the exact same way. This is where I started my journey of working on reflective and transparent materials such as metal, light casings, glass and acrylic/plexiglass. That process evolved to how I am currently practicing and making work today by using a laser cutter to selectively etch into pieces of marbled acrylic that make it possible for it to absorb oil paint.
2. Can you tell us more about the theme in your art and your inspiration?
My work explores female sexuality as a space where pleasure, power, shame, desire, vulnerability, and control overlap. I use beauty and sensuality to invite the viewer in, then introduce moments of tension that complicate that attraction. I am interested in how our responses to sexuality are shaped by culture, expectation, and personal experience.The paintings live inside contradiction: empowerment and submission, intimacy and exposure, pleasure and pain. Their overlap is where the work becomes most honest.
Earlier in my practice, sexuality was often filtered through shame. This body of work comes from a different place. It is less interested in apology and more interested in appetite, freedom, and self-expression. It grows directly from lived experience and from rejecting the idea that female desire must be softened, hidden, or made acceptable for someone else.
Ultimately, the work is about the freedom to exist within contradiction: to experience pleasure without shame, vulnerability without weakness, and sexuality without asking permission. My aim is for it to be beautiful enough to seduce and direct enough to unsettle. If a painting makes someone question why they are comfortable with desire in one form but threatened by it in another, then it has done its job.
3. How does your art life impact other parts of your life?
I would have to say art impacts every aspect of my life in some way. When you are an artist or creative, that is the lens in which you view the world. I am a walking, talking piece of art. The way I dress, the way I think and the way in which I interact with people and spaces all reflect my creativity. My mother used to always say, writing makes you immortal and I feel the same goes for art. My goal is to leave the world a little more beautiful and unique than I found it. To put something out into the world that didn’t exist before me.
4. Could you share any difficulties and hardships you had to face in life and how or if you managed/overcame them?
My biggest challenge in life has been losing my mother to cancer at the age of 19. It was my freshman year of college. My mom wrote me a letter before she died where she told me to “be an artist, it’s what’s in your soul.” I took that advice with me to college and graduate school. Any time I considered doing something different, when the art world felt too harsh and I didn’t know if I could do it or I considered pursuing something more practical, I always came back to those words. An artist has no other choice but to be an artist. Anything else feels inauthentic to your physical being and soul.
5. What practical advice can you give to fellow artists?
I am certainly not an expert, as I am still navigating what it is to be a working artist. The best advice I can give to another artist is to keep going. Make work that feels scary to make, that feels real and vulnerable to put out into the world. People connect to that kind of work. That and talk to other artists. Build a community of artist misfits. Even if that community is online. Receiving feedback and collaborating with other artists is wildly helpful to your practice.
Website: www.joannabavero.com
Instagram: @joannabaverofineart
tiktok: @joannabavero
