Joan Foth was born in Elmira, NY, in 1930. She graduated from the High School for Music and Art in New York City and then Barnard College in 1952. Foth spent three decades in Kansas, and only became familiar with the Southwestern palette that dominated her work for the remainder of her career during a vacation in 1976. After that she periodically left her family in Kansas for week-long painting trips around the Santa Fe area, finally settling in Chimayó in 1985, where she lived alone until her death in 2010. In 1970, she was one of the first recipients of an artist-in-residence grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Foth was also a recipient of the Kansas Governor’s Artist Award in 1983, the Kansas Arts Commission Lithography Award in 1986, and the Monroe Award for outstanding teacher at Washburn University in 1982. Foth’s paintings are held in the collections of the Wichita Art Museum, the Beach Museum at Kansas State University, and Mulvane Art Museum, among others. Foth’s panoramic watercolors are highly regarded for capturing the quiet majesty of the New Mexico landscape. Living alone in the remote town of Chimayó in Northern New Mexico, Foth demonstrated an extraordinary facility with watercolor painting. Foth depicted legendary mountain vistas with sumptuous colors bespeaking the graceful palette for which New Mexican sky, clouds, and mountains are renowned. It was said that Foth had a remarkable grasp of the unique atmospherics of the high desert landscape and was called “the O’Keeffe of watercolor.” Unique in her softened almost vague interpretations, Foth believed that when painting nature, one must give it up at some point and then create something parallel to nature. She felt that, in her work, the line between representational and abstract-representational painting merged and became one.