More About Joëlle Diane Zellman
Joëlle Diane Zellman’s work lives in the space where beauty and pressure coexist. She creates layered figurative imagery that reflects the lived experience of a body negotiating a world built for speed and convenience. The themes of her work and the characters within hold tension even while appearing composed, revealing the quiet strength required to persist through illness, care, and constantly shifting expectations.
Her foundation in the arts began early in Akron, where she trained in the visual and performing arts programs at Miller South and Firestone High School. Those formative years built a strong regional identity rooted in community resilience. Making art in a post-industrial Midwest, where beauty, grit, and resourcefulness are often intertwined, shaped her belief that creativity can thrive even when infrastructure lags behind it.
Zellman continued her education at the Columbus College of Art & Design, refining classical techniques in drawing, painting and sculpture while deepening her understanding of art history through focused study in Florence, Italy. Those experiences continue to inform how she composes digitally. Even in her most contemporary pieces, the structure of traditional craft guides every choice. Working digitally with the sensibility of a classically trained painter, she creates figurative, layered compositions that investigate how technology reshapes human experience, the environment, and our understanding of truth.
Although her tools have evolved, her priorities have not. Color, line, and symbolism remain central. Rosy cheeks, dancers and Schiele-like forms, return again and again—metaphors for resilience, vulnerability, and the cost of being alive. Work she is currently exploring considers the hidden impacts of digital comfort on both the human body and the natural world. The work suggests that ease often depends on something, or someone, absorbing the strain.
Over time, Zellman’s artistic needs led her into production work and eventually the establishment of Monochrome Canvas. What began as a search for a more reliable way to produce archival prints of her own pieces developed into a full studio practice, where she brings her understanding of fine-art principles into the printmaking process for others. Her belief is straightforward: if artwork is meant to last, the materials and methods must rise to meet that intention. Running a print studio as an artist allows her to ensure that what is collected and exhibited carries the integrity of something worthy to collectors.
Today, Zellman’s studio practice and printing practice operate side by side, each strengthening the other. She develops new bodies of work that confront what we overlook in pursuit of ease, and she supports artists who are equally committed to the meaningful physical life of their images. Her work has appeared in exhibitions and media throughout Northeast Ohio, and she continues to expand its reach beyond the region.
At its core, her art asks viewers to sit with what they would normally scroll past. There is beauty here, but it is never effortless. It is earned. And it reminds us that paying attention is part of the work.