About Joelle’s WRITING

Joelle Burnette is an award-winning author, screenplay writer, and journalist. She has been a writer for a New York Times daily newspaper in Northern California after having written for other newspapers and receiving her master’s in journalism/communications from Stanford University.

​Her writing experience also extends to her work in television news in San Francisco, book editing, congressional offices on Capitol Hill and in California, and media relations on presidential and other regional political campaigns.

About Joelle’s ART

Concurrently, Joelle is an award-winning artist who has been painting professionally for over two decades. In California, her work has been shown at the Marin Society of Art in Marin County and the Association for the Arts in Sonoma County. It has also been displayed at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in Sebastopol, the Riverfront Art Gallery, and the Bodega Bay Gallery, among many other locations.

In 2018, quite by accident, Joelle’s art underwent a radical shift. It moved from hyper-realism to pointillism and contemporary abstract impressionism. With this change, she stumbled upon the fortuitous relief from her severe, painful, and disruptive Tourette Syndrome (TS) tics. Joelle creates pieces in her “Galaxy Paintings” series by accurately counting the number of dots she paints. She records them in groups of 10. Counting while painting thousands of dots provides a fulfilling outlet for her OCD. The focused work also calms her TS.

The dot count on her work ranges broadly. She can fit more than a thousand dots on a stone the size of a quarter. On a large canvas, she can place hundreds of thousands of dots, which takes months to complete. So far, Joelle’s largest piece is a 30-inch-by-40-inch canvas with 310,650 dots painted on it, creating her “Magnolia Galaxy.” 

While painting these Galaxy paintings, Joelle’s technique combines automatism with conscious refinements, generating suggestive forms inside each galaxy she paints. The design reveals itself organically until she sees a galaxy come into view, resembling stars clustering in space. Time-lapse videos of the process can be viewed on her YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/joelleburnette). In addition to her pieces being displayed in numerous group shows in galleries and online, Joelle’s art can be found in private collections, as well as in children’s book illustrations, custom graphic designs, retail stores, and sold at arts shows and farmers markets. She designed the cover art for her books, and her drawings fill her coloring books for adults, including Hearts: The Adult Coloring Book of Love’s Journey. She transforms her paintings into products sold in stores and on Etsy at https://JBBurnetteDesigns.etsy.com where she also sells her beaded embroidery jewelry.

When she isn’t writing or painting, Burnette enjoys camping, traveling, photography, swimming, and spending time with her family. Purchase her art on Etsy at JBBurnetteDesigns.