| Eric Joyner | |
| Birth Place: | San Mateo, California |
| Occupation: | Artist |
Eric Joyner (born c. 1960)[1] is a contemporary American artist whose body of work has focused on robots and donuts.[2]
Joyner grew up in San Mateo, California, and spent some time in Medford, Oregon, after his family moved there.[1] He was always interested in art and attended the Academy of Art University in San Francisco.[3] He began working as a commercial illustrator in 1984[4] and created the cover art for several video games, such as Tales of the Unknown, Volume I: The Bard's Tale, Realm of Impossibility, and .
In 1999, he chose to focus only on topics that he likes. He started painting with four different elements: Mexican masks, San Francisco city life, old newspaper cartoons and Japanese robots. He found that the robots were the most popular feature with his friends.[5] He had been collecting toy robots for about 20 years and wanted to bring them to life. In 2002, he felt that he needed another element to work off of.[3] Inspired by the film Pleasantville, in which Jeff Daniels paints donuts, Joyner added donuts.[1] The donuts have been featured as both objects of desire and adversaries to the robots.[6]
Joyner paints approximately 20 paintings a year with his original works selling from anywhere from $3000 a piece to $75,000. George Lucas is one of his most famous buyers. Several of his paintings are used as set pieces in the TV show The Big Bang Theory.[7] An adaptation of his 2007 work "The Collator", "Submerged", is featured on the album cover for the Ben Folds Five album The Sound of the Life of the Mind.[8] His painting "Malfunction" is used on the cover of Robot Law, a scholarly volume on robotics law and policy edited by Ryan Calo, A. Michael Froomkin, and Ian Kerr.[9]
Joyner has two books about his paintings including Robots and Donuts (2008) and Robotic Existentialism: The Art of Eric Joyner (2018).