Joy Cyr
I was born in Montreal, Canada at the beginning of 1975. At the age of ten months I was diagnosed with bilateral retinoblastoma, a cancer of the retina. By the time it was found the doctors felt there was no alternative but to immediately enucleate (remove) my right eye. For the next two and a half years they struggled to destroy the cancer in order to save my left eye. In spite of heroic efforts on the part of many medical professionals, at the age of three and a half years my left eye was enucleated.
I feel that I am truly blessed in that my memories of those years are startlingly clear. More than thirty years later I am still able to recall places, scenes and objects in vivid detail and breath taking colour.
Colours are probably what I have consistently most missed. They have always held a fascination for me. Learning how the spectrum is constructed: how the light refracts to make the colours; and how the primaries blend to make secondary colours as well as the infinite wonder and variety of shade and depths that can be created was probably the science lesson that had the most permanent impact on my personal life.
Like many children I greatly enjoyed my crayons, water colours and finger paints both before and after I lost my sight. Later, I was taught sculpture and I learned to work with several different types of media from soap stone to clay. I experimented with zinc and copper. In addition, I was taught some of the basic principles of shading with colours in order to achieve particular effects. (These were lessons I later put to good use when applying cosmetics.)
In my final year of high school my art teacher introduced me to pastels. She also suggested a different way to outline my work so that I could feel where I was applying the pastels. I was delighted with the success of the first picture made with this technique and I spent several weeks in enthusiastic composition. Regrettably, I soon found that while this is a functional technique with which one can achieve wonderful effects, it is not equal to the kind of realistic pictures I imagined and desperately wished to draw. Eventually I found working with the pastels too painful and set them aside. For
many years I focused my artistic energies in fibers and textiles. In such crafts as knitting and weaving I am able to follow through on the images in
my mind. But they leave my longing to create with colour largely unsatisfied. It was with great pleasure that I again began to work with oil pastels.
The abstract drawings I now create are the perfect medium in which I can spread and blend the colours I love.
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