Tara Joy’s artwork is distinctive because of the diverse range of materials and styles that she utilises. She is comfortable working with subtle shades, tones and brush strokes for life-like oil portraits and yet is also inclined towards using bold, sharply contrasting, stylised techniques for her book illustrations and fantasy art. However there are constants that can be found throughout her art such as a love of fine detail, hidden depths to be discovered, celebration and exploration of colour and texture and her appreciation of the play and contrast between light and dark.

Tara has a keen interest in telling the stories of people through portraiture. With her portraits she attempts to capture not only the form of her subjects but also to give a glimpse into their stories, emotions and the atmosphere of their surroundings. She loves to sketch people whilst they are going about their everyday ordinary and extraordinary activities.

For convenience sake many of her portraits are small however she has also done some large oil portraits. A number of these were for a Royal family in India because many of their original portraits were lost during the time of Partition.

Tara not only paints on inanimate surfaces but also on the moving canvases of people. She paints people of all ages and varies the styles according to the occasions and peoples requests. Yet even her more conventional face-painting subjects such as animals, pirates and superheroes are imbued with a quirky use of colour and pattern and are often made to fit with the colour schemes of the individuals.

She particularly loves to improvise scenes and patterns on the people that bring out interesting parts of their personalities and appearances. She works with the principle of bringing out something special in each person who she paints.

Since being a small child Tara has been enchanted by the idea of writing and illustrating stories. She wrote and illustrated a few books prior to 2016 but it wasn’t really until the publication of her book ‘The Inner Sense of Trees’ in 2016 that she really started to gain momentum in realising her dream to both write and illustrate books.

She now also illustrates the stories and writing of others. She loves to bring creative ideas and stories to life and her wide range of styles means that she is able to tailor her illustrations to fit with many genres and writing styles.

Tara has created many works of art that explore the worlds of dream and imagination. She is interested in the hidden depths and boundless terrains within the natural world and the subconscious. Her fantasy art is full of scenes pulsing with a childlike expression of magic and fantastic beings. Many of these pictures can be viewed from different angles to see further aspects of the pictures.

Through her fantasy art Tara is giving the viewers the opportunity to consider that there is more to any picture than initially meets the eye and that all our of natural and manmade surrounding are full of life and that the closer one looks, the more fantastical it appears.