Joyce Saunders-Diop has been painting and drawing since she was four years of age, raised by my mother, a painter who trained for nine years in the 1960s at the Beaux Arts Academy of Paris. Her Texan grand-mother was also a very talented painter, albeit in a far more conservative manner.

Saunders-Diop established her practice and first studio in Bonnington Square, London in the mid-1980s and has been based at Lewisham Arthouse since 2002. Using both multi-media and painting, Saunders-Diop has throughout the years endeavoured to research various themes revolving around energy, environment and anti-racism, as well as other philosophical or purely aesthetic or poetic concerns. She communicates these findings and discoveries in both abstract and figurative languages, and often in mixed media, holding as sacred the freedom to use whichever pictorial language she finds most suited to the message she is conveying. Saunders-Diop particularly enjoys working on a large scale and reserves the right to express herself as an artist in whatever fashion she chooses.

Saunders-Diop has been developing a series of works revolving around Cars (2000-2007), and most recently a new series on Horses (Summer 2007 onwards). Climate change and its many causes and consequences has become her prevailing over-riding focus since viewing Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 and attending a Vivienne Westwood talk in March 2008.

”At present, the horses noble and natural beauty and energy represent, in my work, forces which do not oppress. They embody, in my continued search to express environmental and social concerns, not only the nature which is at threat around us and our ever growing con-urbanizations, but the nature within each one of us, often starved of spiritual and physical freedom.” – Joyce Saunders-Diop