Joy Postle, Snowy Egrets, Dogwood and Swamp Maple, 1950. Oil on board, 30 by 40 inches.
*Joy Postle was known in Orlando and Orange County as the “Bird Lady”. Hundreds of painters have used Florida’s bird life as their subject but Joy Postle ranks as one of the best. Postle was born in Chicago and studied at the Art Institute. As a young woman she lived on a ranch on the Snake River Plateau of Idaho, rode horseback, painted, and taught art and music in rural country schools. When she opened a studio in Boise a reporter, Robert Blackstone, called for an interview. They were married a year later and in 1928 began a roaming honeymoon through the southwest in a small “house car” fitted as an artist’s studio. One freezing morning Postle pulled out her watercolors to paint a scene at Utah’s Zion Park and the watercolors froze. The couple headed to Florida, arriving in Pensacola in 1931.
Postle opened a studio at the San Carlos Hotel, where she painted a series of murals described in the Pensacola Journal of April 17, 1932, “I don’t know what the San Carlos paid Joy Postle for her work, but whatever it was, it was worth it. She has put the very spirit of Pensacola into the San Carlos Hotel and has painted some Pensacola scenes that are more than lovely. There is one that makes you catch your breath. You just know that she painted it early one morning some weeks ago, just after she had been there to see this bit of water and cliff and woodland in all their breathless beauty… right above the news-stand, is old Pensacola, way back in 1743…nearby, just as a bit of contrast, there is Pensacola beach on Santa Rosa Island as it is today. With gay modernistic umbrellas and lounging ladies… there are other historical and woodland pictures here and there suggesting the past that is historic, and the present that is so beautiful…I love every sprawling vine she has painted and every little smug flower pot, all the color and gaiety. But what I love most of all is what she has tried to say, and said so well…she has pictured a background of valor and pomp and power, and something of strength against which the colors gleam and the vines form their graceful tracery. I think the San Carlos is Joy Postle’s big piece of work.”
Postel and her husband left Pensacola to travel about the state, exploring the Keys, the Everglades, Ocala and Silver Springs. She fell in love with Florida’s wading birds. In 1937, while living in Ocala, Postle was appointed artist-teacher on the staff of the University Federal Gallery at Camp Roosevelt. She, like many artists during the Depression, worked for the Florida Art Project of the WPA. In 1942 the couple moved to Orlando and Lake Rose, out on the Old Winter Garden Road. Here she and Bob Blackstone made plans for an “entertainment,” a “Glamour Bird” act. Blackstone recorded birds chirping while Postle played the piano, and then used these sounds to accompany Postle, as she painted birds for an audience. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata accompanied her as she sketched night heron’s. Brahms, Lullaby played as she added a nest to a picture, recited poetry, sang, danced, and painted the Glamour Birds of Florida. Art Digest, quoted her, “A painting is a dance performed with brush and pigment on a stage of canvas. It must be spontaneous and joyous, as a dance.”
During World War II, Postle gave many performances of her Glamour Birds at Army and Navy Hospitals across the country. An advertising pamphlet put out by Blackstone and Postle, describes her work, “Joy Postle brings the mysterious swamps and waterways of the America’s to her audiences in songs, witty stories, original verse, and pictures…She brings the perfume of wild flowers, the spell of the woods and fields as she sings, and draws the wading birds, life size in color… She gives vivid descriptions of their almost human ways of courting, dancing, and home building. Their eggs seem to hatch out before your eyes…You laugh at their comical antics, and hold your breath as they face danger.”
In the 1940’s while Marjorie Stoneman Douglas was battling to save the Everglades, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was writing about life at Cross Creek, Joy Postle was capturing Florida wildlife on canvas. She waded through swamps, climbed trees, endured bugs and stayed up all night to observe her subjects. She brought the wilderness to the city by painting panoramic murals on buildings scattered around Central Florida. On Lake Rose, the Blackstones took moonlight canoe rides to listen to the whooshing of nighthawk wings as the birds dove for bugs, or to look in on a rookery of black-crown night herons. For years the “Bird Lady” danced and painted, from Jacksonville to Miami, from Sarasota to Tampa and up to Gainesville, all over the state.
In 1968 a dripping kerosene heater started a fire that killed Bob Blackstone, put Postle in the hospital for fourteen months, and destroyed their home and many paintings. In May of 1969 the Kissimmee Junior Women’s Club and the local branch of the Beta Sigma Phi sorority, sponsored a Show For Joy, and later a Paint For Joy, with all funds going to Postle, for a new burn treatment, and for repair of her studio. Joy’s eye’s were damaged but after a series of operations, she returned to painting in April 1969. The Florida Federation of Art sponsored a public demonstration of her art at the Deltona Community Center. The “Bird Lady” and her “Glamour Birds” were back.
Postle was not just a painter of birds, she was an avid advocate for nature conservation. Her letter to the Orlando Sentinel Star, August 12, 1973, “It is a fact that DDT has developed races of super mosquitos and cockroaches which nothing will kill, short of a well aimed brick… It is also a fact not to be ignored that the ‘wonder’ pesticides have caused the death of millions of fish, wild animals, birds, even valuable domestic animals, not to mention quite a few people…No name calling can discredit Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring.” Postle’s life was her art. She continued to paint and write poetry into her 90’s, sometimes from a wheelchair. When she died in June 1989, at the age of ninety-three, she was renowned in Central Florida for her art work. Today her legacy of Florida wildlife art is almost forgotten. *Excerpted from articles in the Orlando Sentinel, November, 18, 1986; the Kissimmee Gazette, May 30, 1968; and the Joy Postle Papers, Special Collections, University of Central Florida, Libraries, Orlando.
Born: January 20, 1896, Chicago.
Died: June 1, 1989, Orlando.
Education: Art Institute of Chicago, scholarship (1915-1917).
Membership: Pensacola Art Club, new member, May 1932; Sebring Art Society; Florida Federation of Art.
Exhibits: Pensacola Art Club, April 1932, Seminole Lodge; San Carlos Hotel, Pensacola, 1932, Pensacola murals; Pensacola Federal Gallery, April 1938, A Survey of Artistic Activity in Florida, watercolor, Needle Gar; University of Florida, School of Architecture and Allied Arts, Peabody Hall, January 1939; Daytona Beach Art League Annual, March 1941, jury; Hotel Ormond, Ormond Beach, March 17, 1945, program entitled, Glamour Birds; Commission’s: Casa Iberia, Rollins College, 1945; First National Bank and Trust Company, Stuart, 1961; Orlando Fashion Square Mall, mural, ten foot by thirty-three foot; College Park barber shop; Seminole Hotel, Winter Park, 1964, mural; Orlando Sunland Center for the Retarded, 1970, mural; Woman’s Club, Stuart, Florida, mural; St Cloud Hotel dinning room, mural; Seminole Hotel, Winter Park, mural; Disney World, 1971, snakes!
