“In high school, I spent most of my energy on drawing, painting and working in a lumber mill to save up for school. After winning a few awards, I knew I’d be attending art school. So I left home (in Oregon) and attended the Academy of Art in San Francisco for four years. While there, I made a few friends and won some awards. Later, with influential teachers like Francis Livingston, Kazu Sano, Bill Sanchez and Robert Hunt, my illustration skills improved and soon was getting a few advertising jobs during his last semester at the Academy (mostly pen and ink and school book assignments).”
“After art school, I joined the San Francisco Society of Illustrators and participated in their annual shows, charities and Air force art programs. The clients were educational publishers, high tech companies, card companies, magazine publishers and advertising agencies. In 1989 I won two gold medals in the S.F.S.I. annual show.”
“During the recession of the early 1990s I took a computer animation assignment, not knowing a mouse from a hole in wall…learning 5 programs at the same time and trying to meet deadlines may sound fun, but I don’t recommend trying it. Anyway, after 3 months of torture, I chose not to pursue animation. The training was good though and still use some of the things I learned. A few years later, I took a job texture mapping and got to relive the learning/producing nightmare. The next job, doing backgrounds for internet cartoons at Spunky Productions, for some reason, was not such a headache.”
“In 1999 I started to enter various juried shows at Artisans Gallery in Mill Valley, CA. and the work was well received. Shows in other galleries, (usually group shows) were positive as well. In 2000, after years of painting other people’s pictures, I made the decision to only paint things that I liked. Four series of paintings of different subjects were started; they were: San Francisco urbanscapes, paintings of old newspaper cartoons characters, Mexican masks, and last but not least, Japanese tin (toy) robots. Though all four series of these subjects were enjoyable to do, I chose to focus on the tin robots, as they were the most popular and seemed to have the most possibilities.”
“So, armed with a small collection of tin robots and spaceships I began painting them in earnest. In attempt to bring them to life without losing their charm, I showed them where they belonged: outer space. By 2002 the paintings were looking good, but they still needed something to play off of… perhaps a nemesis. After a month or so of searching for a ‘nemesis’ I had an epiphany while watching the movie ‘Pleasantville.’ In one of the scenes, Jeff Daniels paints a still life of…donuts. With thoughts of Wayne Thiebaud’s pastries always close at hand, it wasn’t difficult to see the battle scene of robots retreating from 300-foot tall donuts when I went to bed that night. The rest, as they say, is history.”
A budding artist since elementary school, Joyner, who grew up in San Mateo, attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. After graduation, he made a name for himself doing commercial illustrations for companies like Mattel and Microsoft. “It was kind of boring,” he says of working on projects for corporate America. “My style has changed in that I realized I like humor and I like evoking people’s emotions with art.”
In 1999, Joyner began painting from his collection of robots. “Back in the old days, I used to go to flea markets and vintage shows and purchase them,” he says. The robots appeared in both absurd and strangely endearing scenarios, from surfing a wave to knocking one another out in a boxing ring to watching TV on the couch with a child to the simple act of vacuuming. What is most surprising about these images is the humanity behind the machinery; the lives of Joyner’s robots are at times adventurous and at others, quotidian. Bright colors, impressive detail, and a light-hearted feeling of fun are hallmarks of his work. Joyner’s paintings are the epitome of the term “eye candy.”
By 2002, however, he was getting bored and decided that the toys needed a nemesis. Enter donuts, which have added a delightful and whimsical dimension to his work. The pillowy puffs of dough have been shown strapped to an elephant’s back as robots lead the way through the jungle, as flying saucer-style transport for a warrior robot (complete with lollipop staff), and as a substitute ring-toss on a skyscraper. There’s no shortage of pop culture references in Joyner’s work, either: Frankenstein, King Kong, Godzilla, Santa Claus, and Buddha all appear in his paintings, set against familiar landscapes, many of them in San Francisco. “My work speaks for itself,” Joyner says. “I do narratives. That way I don’t have to explain it. I don’t like talking much.” One painting takes anywhere from two days to two weeks to complete, depending on how complicated the narrative is and how many robots are depicted. As time goes on, the robots depicted in his paintings are becoming more modern. Currently, he’s on ‘80s models. Joyner shows about every 18 months at the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles. He’s also shown at the Miller Gallery in Cincinnati, the former Trifecta Gallery in Las Vegas, and has done multiple exhibits in New York.
But Joyner’s art isn’t contained to gallery walls. In 2004, a humor blogger who also wrote for Warner Bros. contacted Joyner for permission to put his painting “The Final Blow” on Teen Nickelodeon’s show Zoe 101. A couple of years later, a set dresser for The Big Bang Theory asked to use his artwork in various sets for the CBS series. Joyner even appeared onscreen along with his artwork in the 2010 romantic comedy Group Sex starring Tom Arnold and Lisa Lampanelli. “If you sell your work in Los Angeles and someone buys your piece, the word just spreads,” he says. “It’s a small community.”
Joyner also published a 184-page book, Robots and Donuts, in 2008, and his work became the cover art for the band Ben Folds Five and their The Sound of the Life of the Mind album. Recently, an art fabrication shop called Pretty in Plastic in Los Angeles made a toy based on Joyner’s “All Wrapped Up Again” painting. The tiny sculpture of a robot holding a donut while being attacked by a giant snake will be released in November. The depiction is also available on throw pillows, tank tops, T-shirts, and iPhone skins through Nuvango.
He hasn’t kept track of how many of these toys he owns, saying his collection is somewhere between “50 and 100” pieces. Some are the actual vintage objects found at flea markets and collector’s events. Others are reissues that look “pretty much identical” to the originals, but cost quite a bit less. “They’re blocky and basic. They usually have big eyes,” says Joyner of the collectibles. “It takes imagination to make them come alive.”The robots are often the models for Joyner’s whimsical paintings. “They’re stiff,” says the San Francisco-based artist over the phone. “They don’t really move at all, so I have to breathe life into them, make them do things that they can’t really do.”
For his latest show, “It’s a Jungle Out There,” opening at Corey Helford Gallery on Jan. 21, Joyner’s robots find themselves in Thailand. The collection is a continuation of Joyner’s Robots and Donuts work. In some of the pieces, you can find the sweet treats mingling with automatons against the brightly hued settings. Not too long ago, Joyner traveled to Thailand for the first time. He went on tours, rode an elephant and saw an array of gorgeous, colorful flowers. It was an inspiring trip. “When I got back, I was doodling weird things that later became paintings,” says Joyner. He began working on “It’s a Jungle Out There,” his first solo show in over a year, off-and-on in spring of 2011. By July, he had dove into the project. “I kind of write down ideas, looking back at everything I saw, looking at photos,” says Joyner of his process for this show. “I work on five at a time in various stages. Some are just drawings. Some are sketches. Some have a little bit of paint on them.”
Joyner has completed 16 new pieces for Saturday’s show. He worked with oils and some of the pieces are quite large. On Tiger Mountain, which you can see on the following page, is 64” x 48”. “It was hard, I tell you,” says Joyner. “A lot of detail. A lot of leaves.” Not all of the robotic creatures featured in his work are based on his models. In Catfish, a cat appears dressed in a metallic fish suit. It’s a play on the variety of fish and, Joyner adds, a comment on the idea that “the grass is always greener, you want to be someone else.” The character is an original design. And while his robots’ next adventure remains uncertain, it should be exciting.