Joyce offers custom artwork for wall murals such as the one shown above which graces the dining room wall of her home. You can read about this painting in the newspaper article below.

Dinner Is Gumbo For 8 With View Of The Bayou

Louisiana Roots led To Whole Swamp On Wall

By BILL CHAPMAN
Staff Writer – The Herald
1992
ROCK HILL, S.C. – It looks like it’s early morning.
You can almost feel the mist hanging over the black waters of the bayou swamp and hear an egret call as it leaps from a cypress tree for the sky. The detail Joyce Wright is painting in a scene from her Louisiana roots on her dining room wall sets it apart from the church murals she’s known for locally. “It brings back memories,” Joyce said, standing in front of the unfinished mural in her home. “When people sit here and eat my Louisiana gumbo and etouffee, they can see my Louisiana swamp.”

Joyce grew up in Lake Charles, La., and moved to Rock Hill in 1964. She operates “This Is Joyce” interior decorating business from her home. She has painted murals in churches in the city over the years, including Oakland Baptist Church. “When you do murals for a baptistery, you paint for it to be seen from a distance,” she said. “I always try to put something in a mural for fun. I’m putting a lot more details in this one because you can see it up close.”

Details like a lady bug, butterfly, an alligator, snake, turtle, moss-ladened cypress trees with broken limbs, mosquitoes and two fishermen, who represent her mother and father. “My father died recently,” Joyce said. “It was not unusual for them to be on the water fishing early in the morning.” When Joyce decided she wanted to paint the mural, she called her sister, Betty, who is also an artist and who still lives in Louisiana. Her sister’s photographs of swamps, trees and birds helped Joyce plan the painting. “If we turn the lights off, this is the way it looks in the swamp in the morning,” she said.