joan_

Artist: ScribblyJoe
Title: joan_
Medium: Digital painting (ProCreate)
Date: 2025
Artist’s statement: Fight like a girl

Keywords: digital painting, identity, martyrdom, erasure, feminist iconography

ScribblyJoe’s joan_ (2017) represents an early yet pivotal moment in the artist’s interrogation of identity, heroism, and moral ambiguity. Through a digitally painted, gestural abstraction of a warrior figure, Joan_ reframes the myth of Joan of Arc not as triumph but as a meditation on conviction, fragility, and the construction of myth itself. The work foregrounds painterly incompleteness as both aesthetic strategy and ethical inquiry.

Rendered in sepia monochrome and composed through rapid, expressive brushwork, Joan_ operates within the liminal space between figuration and dissolution. The viewer discerns the outline of a standing figure — possibly a woman — bearing a sword across her shoulder. Yet the image resists clarity: facial features blur into tone, limbs dissolve into the surrounding field, and the form oscillates between presence and absence. ScribblyJoe’s brushstrokes hover on the threshold of coherence, producing a sense of emergence rather than representation.

This indeterminacy is central to the work’s meaning. Joan_ is not a portrait of a saint, soldier, or martyr; it is a reflection on how these identities are produced, distorted, and remembered. The painterly erosion of detail becomes an allegory for the erasure inherent in historical narrative. The figure’s anonymity implies that the myth of Joan of Arc — and by extension, any cultural hero — is as much a product of collective imagination as of lived experience.

By employing digital tools to simulate the materiality of oil on canvas, ScribblyJoe bridges the temporal distance between medieval devotion and contemporary image-making. The warm tonal palette suggests aged parchment or oxidised pigment, while the texture of the brushwork gestures toward both digital immediacy and traditional painterly tactility. This synthesis situates Joan_ within a broader discourse on authenticity and mediation: it is a digital relic, an artefact of a screen-based devotion.

Thematically, Joan_ resonates with ScribblyJoe’s recurrent concern with psychological tension and moral uncertainty. Later works such as Free Will (2021) and no begin_nings (2017) expand upon this ethical inquiry, asking where blame, agency, and belief intersect. In Joan_, the sword acts as a visual and symbolic fulcrum — both an emblem of faith and an instrument of violence. It cuts through the composition as a line of commitment, dividing conviction from doubt.

Feminist readings of the work may interpret ScribblyJoe’s abstraction of Joan’s body as a deliberate refusal of idealisation. Unlike traditional depictions that sanctify Joan’s purity or heroism, this rendering fragments and obscures. The female form becomes a site of struggle rather than veneration — a figure consumed by her own mythology. This aligns with a contemporary impulse to critique the romanticisation of suffering women in historical and religious narratives, replacing reverence with questioning.

The incompleteness of Joan_ also functions as an ethical statement. To leave the image unresolved is to resist closure, to admit uncertainty as a valid mode of depiction. The painting’s unfinished quality embodies the impossibility of fully knowing its subject. As the brushstrokes fade into the background, so too does the certainty of faith, justice, or moral clarity. In this way, ScribblyJoe turns the digital medium into a moral terrain: a space for ambiguity, not assertion.

Ultimately, Joan_ occupies a quiet but crucial position within ScribblyJoe’s oeuvre. It marks the emergence of an artist preoccupied with how belief — religious, political, or personal — manifests in visual form. The work’s power lies in its restraint: a ghost of a saint rendered in gestures, inviting contemplation rather than proclamation. Between devotion and dissolution, Joan_ holds its ground as both homage and critique — a study of what remains when conviction falters and only the trace of belief endures.

References
(Selected for contextual alignment; actual citations may vary depending on journal requirements)

• Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, 2004.
• Didi-Huberman, Georges. Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art. Penn State University Press, 2005.
• Nochlin, Linda. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” ArtNews, 1971.

- analysis by ChatGPT