"Right after high school, after graduation, I went into the army. I ended up in jump school (paratroopers) in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with the 101st Airborne Division. I spent three years with the 101st Airborne Division and was discharged in 1966. Luckily, I avoided the Vietnam War. I had so many friends coming back, and they were just furious. It was a sad event. My entire division ended up going over there, but by then I was out of the army.

"So when I got back to San Francisco in 1966, I used the GI Bill to go to art school here in the city, and then up in Portland, Oregon, to the art school there. I studied primarily what is basically known as Methods and Materials, the materials and processes of creating art: how to make paints, how to make grounds, a lot of the esoteric and ancient processes. That’s how I got involved with painting with egg tempera, and eventually starting doing egg tempera over gold leaf, and learned how to do proper gilding.

"So in 1968, my partner and I started our own business here in San Francisco doing gilding and archival restoration on picture frames primarily. I did that, and eventually I left that business and went to work for a good friend who bought the Louvre Frame Shop (on Chestnut Street near the SF Art Institute) in San Francisco from Charles Campbell. I worked with my friend doing contract work, which gave me a tremendous amount of free time to do my art and do the restorations. So I worked when I wanted.

"In 1981, I had an opportunity to go to Virginia. A friend bought a large estate on the Potomac River in King George County, ostensibly to plant vineyards. S I went there and helped him until the summer. I just couldn’t deal with tidewater and the heat – you know, and being a San Franciscan, about 75 degrees was what I was used to. Eventually, I moved up to the Appalachian Mountains, 90 miles west of Washington D.C., in a little community called Linden. I found a little cabin in the mountains, an old hunter’s cabin. I lived there for ten years. We had electricity, but pumped our own water. We did all of our heating with wood. During the winter, all of our cooking was done on wood, because the electricity would go out frequently.

"I did get involved with an artist community in Rappahannock County, which was the next county over in Virginia up in the Appalachian – the Blue Ridge – Mountains. While I was there, a gilding studio in Washington D.C. got wind that I was in the area and convinced me to come into D.C. during the week. From there I did restoration work – at the White House, and the State Department, and many embassies – in gilded restoration. I did a lot of work either in the paint shop at the White House, or, if we were restoring a room, we were actually working in those rooms many days. This was during the Reagan administration. We did the work when the Reagans were out of town. We were there making messes, and some of the work of gilding I did was in the private dining room, and some was in the private suites. So it was better not to have them around. It was just easier.

"It was really exciting because I was able to work on a lot of really historic pieces that the State Department owns – well, that the country owns. My friends and I gilded a large sofa that supposedly (Speaker) Tip O’Neill sat on and broke the handle off. We worked on things from Mt. Vernon, things that George Washington had purchased. So it was quite interesting. I did a lot of work at the National Gallery of Art as an independent gilder – contractor doing restoration on frames. I actually did Nancy Reagan’s portrait frame. And I did a lot of work on Jimmy Carter’s official portrait frame.

"I got tired of that because I still had the desire to create my own work. So I came back to San Francisco in 1991. I came out to Sonoma that year to do some work, and I was sitting in a hot tub beside a swimming pool in February and thinking, ‘Oh, my gosh, I have to go back to Washington D.C. for two-and-a-half more months of winter, then an oppressive summer.’ I just didn’t want to deal with that anymore.

"When I came back to San Francisco in the fall of 1991, I basically started pursuing my own art work. And I’ve been here ever since. And I’m basically doing my own art work to this point. When I came back I did some contract work for a while, for the Lourve Frame Shop that I had been working for in the late 70’s. I did that part-time, again. Eventually, I stopped that completely and focused on my own work. Occasionally, I would do some work for friends when they needed help: gilding church domes or things of that nature. But by that time I was tired of hanging on scaffolding and ladders, working with both hands trying to hold on the scaffolding. It was getting a little tiring."

Question: "When did you start doing your own art work?"
Answer: "I had my first solo show in San Francisco in 1974 or 1975. I had always been doing creative art work, but it was playing second to making a living and doing gilding restoration, and doing reproduction work or historic frames and things."

Question: "Where you able to display your art work somewhere and sell it?"
Answer: "I did for a while, and I had a lot of nice shows in Washington D.C. and the Virginia area while I was there. To tell you the truth, as well as being dyslexic, I also have Asperger’s, and it was always difficult for me. I like doing the work. However, when shows came up and I had to deal with the public, it would freak me out."

Question: "What is Asperger’s?"
Answer: "It is a kind of lower version of autism. When we were kids, these things were not known. When I was in elementary school, the concept of dyslexia or autism was not known. It was just a developmental thing, and I was always in the retarded classes in Lafayette Elementary School. I had a lot of difficulty. I went to Presidio Junior High, and I had a hard time there, too. I never even passed English 3 in Washington High. I got straight A’s in Art, and in P.E.., and D’s and F’s in everything else."

Question: "Even history?"
Answer: "History was fine for me, because I love history, and if I didn’t have to do a written test and was allowed to do an oral test, I would do perfectly well. And it was fantastic. I would get good grades when the teachers would pass me on my good work, and they knew there was something there. But since I could barely read, and I still cannot write at all – that’s one of the things with Asperger’s, you start to write and it just goes into – it’s hard to describe. They started diagnosing it in the 1990’s. It wasn’t quite autism even though there were a lot of similarities. There’s the obsessive disorder – I don’t know if you’ve seen any of my work, but I can sit for hours doing tiny little dots in patterns. It can astound most people, but it’s something that pleases me, sitting for hours doing something like that."

"One of the things I like most is I make my own paints, and I make all of my own grounds. I basically do art from scratch. It’s like baking a cake and grinding your own flour. I use egg yoke as a binder, and I use natural earth pigments: ground minerals and earth pigments. I enjoy the process so much, where I have complete control from the beginning to the end. It is more fun for me to do all of that.

"And that’s basically what I still do. I did teach for a while, in lecture situations or in workshops. I would teach the gilding process. When I started the gilding back in the 60’s in San Francisco, there was virtually no one doing it. There was an old Swiss gentleman, with a studio in North Beach, by the name of Fred Rucker. He knew something about gilding, and I would go and ask him questions, and he would give me lots of hints and ideas. For some reason, I had the ability to go back to my own studio and recreate – I could see an old gilded surface and recreate these things and make reproductions of them. In fact, one day I had a prominent antique dealer come into the studio in North Beach (the Lourve), and he wanted to sell me a 16th century Spanish frame, and I had to tell him that I had made one the year before. He was rather embarrassed. ‘Oh, I knew it wasn’t real,’ he said.

"Most reproductions that I did, I would mark them and sign them. But that has happened to me a couple of times.”

Question: "So you still have a studio and do your art work there?"
Answer: "Right. In 1994, a friend and I bought a really beautiful studio on Ninth and Mission (SoMa).* In 2000, my father passed away, and my Mom had dementia. So I moved out here (Sutro Heights) to take care of my Mom because my brothers had families and all of that. It was easy for me, and I set up a studio here. And in 2006, when she passed away, I just maintained the house here in Sutro Heights. Basically, I’ve turned the whole place into an art studio."

"Actually, it’s interesting that this is actually the first time that I’ve lived in a real house. Most of the places where I lived have been warehouses, store fronts, or funky cabins.

"At this point with all that’s going on around Market Street, with the new construction, it’s mind-boggling if you haven’t been to the city lately. Within the area of 9th and Mission there are probably twelve 14-story plus apartment complexes going in all around Twitter (headquarters). And on Market Street, from Civic Center up, there are at least five major apartment complexes going in. It’s mind-boggling.

"So my partner lost the space on 9th Street. The rent has gone up, and he’s in the process of moving out here to my house-studio. It’s a big two-story house, there’s lots of room, and we’ll just create a big studio here. My parents bought the house in 1966, and the mortgage was paid off quite soon after that. And so, between my brothers and I – we run it. I have no problem maintaining it. And basically, that’s what’s going on.

"So very happily I get up in the morning and spend the whole day creating art. If I’m not creating art, I’m a blithering idiot, believe me. I need that constant work. I wouldn’t call it an addiction, but if I’m not doing it I go a little batty after a while. I’m working on a number of paintings now in the studio."

Question: "Were you born in San Francisco?"
Answer: "Actually, I was conceived in San Francisco, just two blocks from here on 48th Avenue. But my mother was having a difficult birth, and my father was in the Pacific in World War II. So his parents and her parents were living in Portland and Corvallis (Oregon). So my Mom went up there, where I was born in Corvallis."

Questions: "So you’re an Oregonian?"
Answer: "Actually, my whole family is from Oregon and Washington. From there they moved to Hawaii, and then back to San Francisco, where I started in second grade in Lafayette Elementary School. So basically, I consider myself a San Franciscan. That’s where it all started."

Next, Joel showed his art work in two videos, which I placed on YouTube for him.

http://youtu.be/zu-__3RLZKA

http://youtu.be/e-zrYzwMYFk

*[Note: SoMa = South of Market, a relatively large neighborhood in San Francisco, located just south of Market Street; it contains several sub-neighborhoods including South Beach, Mission Bay and Rincon Hill.]  

LINKS TO JOEL HOYER ON THE WEB:

Artist Joel Hoyer
Biography
1968 I began to incorporate water gilding in my egg tempera paintings and sculptures. From 1970 to the present most of my art work is centered on these two mediums. I am currently experimenting with, and abstracting these classic and historic mediums. (Click on link to Read More, and to see lots of Joel’s art work)

Butchboy Studios
Butchboy Studios, with the creative work of Joel Hoyer and his partner, Martin Freeman.
Joel’s education resume: 1966 – Portland Museum of Art School; 1967-68 – San Francisco Academy of Art; 1970-71 – Independent Study in San Francisco; 1972 – Kuliche Studio in New York; 1974 – Research in London, England; 1974 – Research in Florency, Italy.

Joel Hoyer: The Healing Arts, Gilded Work
Short article about Joel called: "The Healing Arts, Gilded Work."

Sinopia Artist of the Month, April 2010
Joel is featured as the Sinopia Artist of the Month, April 2010

Joel Hoyer's Art Work
29 colorful images of Joel’s art (with size and description captions)