Joy Hillyer is a painter whose main focus is abstracted landscape of the natural and built environment around her. She is concerned with the ambiguity of the liminal: the juxtaposition of the real and the imagined, essence and symbol, light and darkness, the enduring and the ephemeral. Some of her paintings reference an ecological or political issue. Some images hint at human impact on the environment. They reveal an unsentimental tension and energy. Colour is as important as form.
After a career in law and legal education Joy Hillyer took an honours degree in garden design and started to paint over 20 years ago. She had three solo shows while living in Central London for eight years and one of her paintings from the (Very) Local Landscape series was selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2022. Three of her water meadow paintings were part of ‘Living Water’, Salisbury Cathedral’s contemporary art show all summer 2025. She now works from her studio near Salisbury.
Website: https://www.joyhillyer.com