Even this winter didn’t shake artist Joyce Cho’s faith in flowers and the beauty in the great outdoors
By KATHLEEN LIPPA
The Express
Joyce Cho puts her hands on her windowsill and looks out the bedroom window that is glistening with rain.
“See that golden alder there?” she says, looking out the window in her dining room. “When the snow bank was really high, almost to the top of the roof talk, I climbed to the top with my pruning shears and I pruned it already.”
“And some of my forsythia,” she continues. “Three major branches had cracked right off. So I’ve got them stuck in water there.” She points to large vases by the fireplace in her living room where the branches bloom.
As the snow melts away on this quiet cul-de-sac in the east end of St. John’s, Cho’s lush garden is coming back to life.
Many plants and bushes in her garden suffered winter damage. On one of her plants, a Japanese memnoci, Cho has surgical tape.
“I was listening to the radio to a gardening show and they said to use surgical tape because it would breathe,” she says.
And there could be more damage she doesn’t know about yet.
“The burning bush over here,” she says, pointing. “There’s damage on those, but I don’t know if I could save them or not. I’ll prune it and see.”
But the Japanese-born artist, who has lived in St. John’s since 1958, is not bitter about all the crushing snow. “It didn’t dampen my spirits,” she says quietly.
Cho has a grace about her that has not only helped her endure this winter, but has also enabled her to paint and embroider some of the province’s most delicate images of plant life, flowers and street scenes.
And after years of painting and being inspired at the Botanical Garden on Mount Scio Road, Cho is finally giving a workshop there on June 3. It will be titled An Element of Botanical Painting: Mixing Green Colours for Leaf.
“I especially chose green paint mixing because it is the basis of plant colour. I always come back to plants,” says Cho, who has worked in — and mastered — all sorts of mediums, from drawing to stitching to films.
“With friends, I’ve been out to paint streets of St. John’s for about three years — once a week.”
When her street-painting friends recently moved, however, Cho no longer felt comfortable going out to paint the streets and houses by herself.
“If you’re out there, painting someone’s house, they wonder what you’re doing there,” she says, laughing.
Cho loves the great outdoors
Cho’s two daughters — whose pictures she proudly displays on her mantle — work in the fields of computer science and physics. When asked if they inherited any of her artistic talents, Cho smiles and recalls that once her older daughter saw an attractive jacket in a store window when she was a student at university. Instead of rushing in and buying it, she went to Fabricville and made her own version of the jacket from scratch. Another summer her daughter also “stitched up” all her own clothes.
Of her own knowledge of the sciences, though, Cho laughs again, and explains she was never a star pupil in the subjects at which her husband and her daughters are so adept. She is an artist, through and through.
“I didn’t understand anything,” she laughs, talking about physics class. “I just leave that to my husband.”