Collection Historical Note
Joy Postle was a rare bird. She rather resembled the long-legged Florida birds featured in her paintings. A plein air artist (from a French expression meaning "in the open air"), Postle painted her subjects in their natural environment. Waiting patiently, often days, despite insects, reptiles, and weather extremes, she captured her subject using a variety of media including watercolor, gouache, and pen and ink.
Katherine Joy Postle, a Chicago, Illinois, native, studied music and art at the Art Institute of Chicago. Upon graduation in the 1920s, Postle moved to the Snake River Canyon area of Idaho establishing herself as an artist and interior decorator. In Idaho, she met her husband, journalist Robert Blackstone. The couple traveled throughout the West, Southwest, and South living in a modified Model-T Ford truck nicknamed Brownie House. Postle painted the surrounding landscapes selling her work as they traveled. Hotels, restaurants, banks, and private clients also commissioned her to design and paint murals, a popular decorating technique at the time. Blackstone served as her publicist and manager. Arriving in Florida in 1934, the couple continued their nomadic lifestyle until purchasing a small home on Lake Rose, near Orlando, in 1942.
In addition to painting and drawing, Postle wrote poetry; authored several books including Fine Feathers (1941), Glamour Birds of the Americas (1944), Drawing Animals (1953), and Drawing Birds (1963); and worked for the WPA Florida Art Project. Around 1937, Postle and Blackstone conceived "Glamour Birds," a unique entertainment show combining recorded bird songs and music with Postle singing, painting birds, and teaching her audience about wildlife and conservation. "Glamour Birds" was performed for local civic and women's organizations and private groups. Notable personalities who saw her perform included members of the DuPont family, Carl Sandburg, Albín Polasek, Guy Beatty, and Andre Smith.
Blackstone died in 1968 in a fire that destroyed their Lake Rose home. It took Postle two years to recover from the burns she suffered trying to save Blackstone. Of her husband, Postle said, "he rowed the boat," allowing her to be a fulltime artist. After her recovery, Postle continued to paint, perform, and teach. She died in 1989. Her ashes were spread on Lake Rose.
Postle’s art was her life. Her work-with its detail, light, color, and humor mixed with fantasy-still captures the imagination of viewers, reminding people of nature in its unblemished form. The University of Central Florida Libraries Special Collections and University Archives' collection of books, manuscript material, and fine art by and about Joy Postle documents her work and her legacy as an artist, muralist, naturalist, poet, writer, and entertainer.
