By unanimous positive response, the new, more visually-interesting version of the Concord Magazine will continue! Each month, we will bring you wonderful art, alternating between Concord artists doing work especially for the magazine and Internet artists who offer beautiful digital art for sites like this one.

This month we bring you our first featured Concord artist: Kristina Joyce (self-portrait at right). Her work has already graced our pages in previous editions, but only a piece here and there. This time around her art is the appetizer, soup, main course, and dessert! We do add some occasional pieces from Internet sources as well as a couple of things we've cooked up ourselves.

You may know Kristina from a variety of sources. She has exhibited her drawings, oil, acrylic, and watercolor paintings, as well as her calligraphy widely in Concord, as well as in other Massachusetts museums and galleries, the Sakharov Congress in Moscow, Russia, Duke University, and the Rotunda of the US House of Representatives. Her shell drawing was on a US postage stamp first day cover. Multilingual, she draws her language skills into her artwork through calligraphy.

She is a member of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators, the Boston Malacological Club, Concord Art Association, as well as the former Concord Scribes and Walden Forever Wild.

Kristina has been studying Concord and its artists for many years, finding in them a continued source of inspiration. She is also an amateur musician, and most recently she has done her first CD cover for Bluejay Studios in Carlisle, MA. We feel it's only right, then, that she illustrates this edition's article about the Concord Sonata and Symphony, as the composers of these pieces, too, took Concordians as their inspiration.

She has many areas of fascination and interest but none which equal that of shells, particularly from the sea; she makes many luminous images of them. "Seashells are often a metaphor for my own life," she says. "I love the interplay of strength and fragility in the shell." You can see her shells on a variety of this edition's pages, as well as her underwater photography of Walden Pond here.

Kristina has been teaching art to both children and adults in her home studio for many years. It's through teaching that she adds new styles and techniques to her repertoire, and you will notice her wide and varied work in these pages.

You can purchase or commission her greeting cards and other art directly from her or through Orchard House and Concord Frame-Ables.

"I like change, and that shows in my art," she says. "Working with Deborah Bier on the Concord On-Line Magazine has been an exciting new horizon for my art, teaching and foreign interests. I enjoyed our working together (there's a bit of genius in her I'd say), and I think that Concord is fortunate to have her electronic creation, 'The Concord Magazine.'"

We've learned a lot working with Kristina and feel we can bring you a stronger magazine and are so pleased with the results, and we think you will be, too. Are you a Concord artist? Would you like to offer your work to this magazine? Contact us!