Jo Gamel

Jo Gamel’s current series of mixed-media oil still lifes explores the ocean as a symbol of the depth, tempestuousness, and magnificence of the feminine spirit. Inspired by global myths of sea goddesses and feminine archetypes, her work postulates collected marine artifacts—such as shells, starfish, and tidal debris—as symbols of transformation and emotional depth. These materials are personally gathered during her surfing and snorkeling adventures, grounding her paintings in personal experience and sensory memory.

Gamel creates these works using traditional oil techniques on a large scale, often referencing vanitas still life traditions to contemplate the tension between permanence and impermanence. Her studio process begins with arranging the found objects into altar-like scenes, then sketching, underpainting, and meticulously layering saturated surfaces that glow with quiet intensity.

This body of work is rooted in Gamel’s belief that myth, memory, and Mother Nature are essential guides in navigating identity and collective transformation. She sees the ocean’s duality—its capacity to nourish and destroy—as a mirror for the feminine experience across time and culture. Her work honors figures like Yemaya, Tiamat, Sedna, and Ganga not through literal portraiture, but through mood, form, and symbolism.

Gamel’s paintings aim to reframe the feminine experience as vast and elemental. They are spaces of reverence and storytelling. In a time of rapid change and ecological uncertainty, her practice calls for reflection, slowness, and a return to what is ancient and enduring.


www.jogamel.com

What themes or emotions are you exploring in your current work?

On circular, oval, and rhombus supports that resemble lenses, vesicas, orbs, and mandorlas, I place tidal relics as liturgical offerings to the tension between wonder and classification, between ancient wisdom and the Age of Modern Science that seeks to name the unknowable. Each arrangement becomes an allegory of the feminine experience within systems of inquiry that both revere and reduce. The work dwells in that threshold where knowledge is shared like the ebb and flow of lunar tides: eternal, ephemeral, nurturing, and tempestuous. Each piece is an altar where tenderness meets baroque exuberance, and our urge to dissect the mystery of creation is gently exposed.


What does your creative process look like?

During surf trips, I make wordless, breath-held free dives to gather shells, sea glass, and flotsam fragments. In my workshop (the laboratory), I build shaped canvases that echo forms of halos, orbs, pools. Then I arrange these votive specimens as altars and paint from life—layering stratas of acrylic and oil paint, gold leaf, and resin until the surface of the shaped substrate hovers between diagram, iris, artifact, and reliquary. Each object is a known curio of the sea, held in ritual attention, distinctly dissimilar to most of our possessions, whose origins are abstract. These vestiges carry the memory of place, tide, and breath, as they collapse into a single apparition.


What inspires you outside of the visual arts?

Open-water immersion, feminist science, and global myth shape the rhythm of my work, alongside the quiet grammars of medical, ancestral, and earthly care. Life in a female body—with its thresholds, imprints, and regenerative cycles—guides how I notice and respond to the world. Across inspiring travels in Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and Mexico, I revisit the shared ecology of our experiences, as simple as sunlight and as complex as love, and the ways these entanglements overlap as forces of both rupture and repair.


How do you balance personal expression with the business side of your career?

My practice maintains an equilibrium between inner sincerity and outward clarity. I edit opportunities to remove noise, honor resolve, and align only with those who recognize that enduring work emerges from inquiry, not urgency. In this way, both creative intention and commerce opportunities become gestures of offering, carried out with gratitude, discernment, and care—building a lifelong devotion, not a reaction to market velocity.


What do you hope viewers feel or take away from your work?

I hope each painting feels like an incomplete breath of enchantment. Intimate fragments of human flotsam—both evidence and oracle—echo the vanitas tradition in its evanescent meditation on impermanence. They invite pause between wonder and ache, to hold time, to tenderly pursue the futility and folly of conquest and triumph. A beautiful impossibility. And all that remains is presence, and the bittersweet, poetic, glorious failure of release.