Joshua Myers takes the artistic leap of faith

Depending on the company, Joshua Myers might be known as the psychologist, his wife's husband, his daughter's father, the host of the barbecue, the gentleman with the goatee, the baseball fan or, he says, "the oddball in the family."

Joshua Myers EVAN WILLIAMS / FLORIDA WEEKLY But he was never Joshua Myers the artist until he debuted a trifecta of photographs nine years ago when he lived in St. Augustine. For Mr. Myers, it was one of the first pieces of his work which he had displayed publically since the fourth or fifth grade. And he was scared to put it out there, to step out of the artistic anonymity that felt so comfortable, yet unsatisfying. Encouragingly enough, his black and white portraits of three jazz musicians received an honorable mention at the St. Augustine Art Association Annual Show and after that, he said, "it just unleashed the floodgate."

He embarked on an artistic journey that has spanned the limits of his camera, as well as painting and various types of mixed media collage — he calls it "visual eclecticism." Recently Mr. Myers, 39, finished a painting called "Human Condition 1, Fear," in part about the journey of growing up again — long after leaving his small hometown, Grand Haven, Mich. — this time as the artist he always wanted to be.

"To me, it's a road map," he said. "To anyone else looking at it, I don't think they know that… It kind of represents for me all this fear of art and putting it out there and how it would be judged. I finally just said 'screw it, I'm going to put it out there.' If you don't try, you don't know."

Mr. Myers has lived in Fort Myers since 2000, where he has a private psychology practice and displays his work on the Internet (www.jmyers.artspan. com) as well as at local galleries like Art League of Fort Myers, Alliance for the Arts, Ferrari Gallery and daas Gallery. In the last year, he has accelerated his artistic output, creating a studio in his home office. He said he has "taken over most of the house. We have paintings hanging everywhere."

Last Friday, more or less his day off, he wrote a psychological evaluation on a client before driving to the Florida West Art Gallery at the International Design Center in Estero, where he was hanging a few pieces for an upcoming show. He had hung a photograph of a street musician he took near downtown Chicago in the 1980s, as well as his recent "Human Condition 1, Fear," which featured, among other images, Buddha's face.

Mr. Myers said he is interested in Eastern philosophies like Buddhism, in part for their relaxing and meditative qualities. Staying relaxed and focused is important for Mr. Myers who said he has been "accused of having ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder)" and whose mind "goes all over the place all the time." For Mr. Myers, creating art has been a therapy and a way to refocus.

"It gives you a different way to organize your thinking about what's important —what the things that really matter are," he said, "and developing yourself as a person.

"Usually the only time I get really focused is when I'm painting. I can get incredibly focused and all the other things just kind of melt away. It's incredibly relaxing and it recharges my batteries to just focus on one thing; to just get the other crap out of the way for a while."

Sometimes he listens to music while painting, mostly rock 'n' roll.

"It kind of depends on what I'm creating," he said. "Radiohead is awesome to have in the background when I'm trying to create. There are other things that are more mellow when I'm trying to relax or do something more spiritualized."

Other influences include surrealist painters like Salvador Dali and Joan Miro, whose art reflects some of the "visual dreams" the Mr. Myers often tries to capture in his own work. But he has been hesitant to reduce his vision to only a few artists, or a few mediums.

"When I was a kid, I tried everything under the sun," he said.

Although he quit producing art altogether in graduate school and limited himself to photographs for a while after that, he's returned to that thinking, branching out into image transfers, linoleum prints and photographic collages: anything that helps him express the human condition.

"Anything that looks fun and interesting, I'm trying it out," he said. "I hate to define art. It's all art. It's all inclusive."