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.

Click here to read Joelle’s blog

About Joelle’s ART

Concurrently, Joelle is an award-winning artist, painting professionally for more than a decade. In California, her work has been shown at the Marin Society of Art in Marin County, the Association for the Arts in Sonoma County, the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in Sebastopol, and the Riverfront Art Gallery, among many other locations.

In 2018 and quite by accident, Joelle’s art made a radical shift from realism to pointillism and contemporary abstract impressionism, stumbling on fortuitous relief of her severe, painful, and disruptive Tourette Syndrome (TS) tics. Creating pieces in her “Galaxy Paintings” Series, Joelle accurately counts the number of dots she paints, recording the dots in groups of 10. The act of counting while painting thousands of dots provides a fulfilling outlet for her OCD, and the focused work calms her TS.

The dot count on her work ranges broadly, from fitting more than a thousand dots on a stone the size of a quarter, to counting hundreds of thousands of dots on a large canvas that 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 to create her “Magnolia Galaxy.” 

While painting these Galaxy paintings, Joelle’s technique combines automatism with conscious refinements to generate suggestive forms inside each galaxy she paints. The design reveals itself organically until she sees a galaxy come into view in what looks like stars clustering in space. Timelapse videos of the process can be viewed on her YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/c/joelleburnette). In addition to her pieces displayed in many group shows in galleries and online, Joelle’s art can be found in private collections, children’s books illustrations, custom graphic designs, and in stores. 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.