Joey Korom is an abstract expressionist painter who has been a practicing artist for 50 years. He experiments with media, colors, and textures to produce artwork that is “purely optical;” that is, artwork meant to engage the viewer, visually and emotionally, without employing any associations outside of the work itself. Joey is passionate about this expressive type of abstraction, an artistic mode that escapes the rules of perspective and realism. His educational and professional background is in architecture, which he considers to be “the father of all arts.” The use of line, shape, and proportion in Joey’s work is visibly influenced by his experience as an architect, but he seeks to avoid the rigidity involved in architectural draftsmanship. He focuses instead on underlying structure, seductive color, and loose brushwork. The artist sees his style as a personal liberation from the demands of architectural drawing, and yet, he’s never lost the disciplines he was taught.