You might have admired her art on your OCBC Frank credit card. 

Marked with iridescent colours, Joanne Lim’s distinctive calligraphy style has been described as “ribbons” on paper: The strokes look like they are unfurling in a spontaneous flow of motion.

Joanne was at the forefront of one of the hottest art trends back in 2014 when she came on to the art scene in Singapore with her version of modern Western calligraphy.

It was created with a paintbrush and a splash of colours, instead of a calligraphy pen and black ink.

Colourful brushwork calligraphy done by Joanne.

Very quickly, individuals and companies saw her art on social media and came knocking on her door.

OCBC Bank printed her design on its Frank credit card and engaged her to conduct a calligraphy workshop for young adults, a market it was targeting. Design Society Singapore and Tatler Singapore ran interviews with her.

Through other collaborations, her designs were soon featured on items such as ice cream tubs and artisanal leather products.

Joanne’s distinctive calligraphy art that was carried on OCBC credit cards.

Not many people know, however, that God was the real Pioneer behind her art.

Even fewer people are aware of how, beneath the shiny exterior of success, Joanne went through a wilderness season in her art and spiritual journey.

“My creative journey is a reflection of my relationship with God. What the artist carries within is revealed on the canvas. It doesn’t lie,” the artist, now 42, told Salt&Light.

Joanne with her family.

The first feeling of awe 

Joanne started out as a graphic designer at various advertising firms. While working at a design house, she was fortunate to work under a boss who taught her how to think differently and who trained her in the craft of typography.

However, after close to eight years in the industry, she was feeling burnt out. She longed to find deeper meaning and a spiritual purpose to her work but it eluded her.

At that time, a colleague gave her a flyer for a calligraphy talk by Tim Botts, a Christian calligrapher from the US. During the talk, he shared about how he would meditate on a verse and use calligraphy to express his response to it.

Joanne was intrigued and inspired to use her creativity for God.

She did not know how to do calligraphy then, so she used what she knew – typography in black and white.

Her first piece featured the verse in James 1: 2-4, “Consider it pure joy…”

In her design, she used different font sizes to emphasise what she thought was important.

“I was using logic: Since the verse was about trials, I made the word ‘trials’ very big, and the main focus. Somehow the design just couldn’t work, it didn’t look right,” Joanne recalled.  

After struggling with it, she decided to jumble it all up. This time, she changed the emphasis to “pure joy” and in that instant, she felt the design fall right into place.

One of the typography prints that Joanne designed.

“I still remember that feeling of awe,” she said. “The Holy Spirit was teaching me which words were truly the emphasis. It was precious because I got to experience His word in a personal way.”

Designing these typography prints became her side hobby that refreshed her from the humdrum of full-time work. She sold those prints on postcards at a gift shop and at the Food for Thought café, which generated good sales as Christian merchandise was rare at that time.

Meanwhile, Joanne was feeling increasingly burnt out with commercial design work. The last straw for her was when she made a mistake and used the wrong thickness for a line in a newspaper ad for a client.

“Nobody blamed me for it but I beat myself up over it,” she admitted. “The difference in thickness was just the width of a strand of hair but I had imposed these expectations on myself.”

Joanne quit her advertising job in 2012.

She had a friend who was training to become a missionary. The thought of becoming one allured Joanne.

“At that time, I felt that what would count in my life was to do things for God. I was trying to get away from ‘worldly things’ and being a missionary was a very clear spiritual ‘job’ to me,” she said.

Joanne filled in the form to attend a school for missions and had to get an elder in her church to sign it.

“She came back to me and told me she didn’t have peace for me to go but if I really wanted she would still sign it for me,” said Joanne.

In the end, Joanne decided not to go. Deep down, she knew she was turning to it as a form of escape.

Instead, she decided to use her gifting for the church and became the media and design lead at Petra Church.

Joanne doing design work at Petra Church.

All staff of the church were sent for inner healing training. During the session, Joanne was led to confront various issues in her life. This led her to forgive herself as she may have been too hard on herself in life.

“After the session, it was as if my choked pipe was being flushed out and I had this renewed passion for beauty and design. I was overflowing with ideas and the desire to create again,” she said.  

The years of working in church was one of the highlights of her creative journey.  They gave her the freedom to create and she enjoyed delivering biblical truths in non-conventional ways.

For example, during Passover, her team made the experience tactile by conducting storytelling through a “museum” exhibit format. They had a replica of the huge nails that were used to crucify Christ and thorns were brought back from Israel that were the same species that were used to make the crown.

“It was my playground but I still did not really know God’s heart then,” said Joanne.

The museum-like exhibits, including the crown of thorns, at Petra Church

Western modern calligraphy 

In 2013, a friend gifted Joanne with some calligraphy tools from Japan. She was very drawn to them but could not find any calligraphy courses to take in Singapore at that time.

The first calligraphy tool that Joanne’s friend gifted her.

During a sabbatical, she went to New York and found a calligraphy talk to attend. In the roomful of participants, many of whom where calligraphy teachers, Joanne worked the room and pleaded with them to take her on as a student while she was in town for a month-long holiday trip.

One teacher finally agreed and Joanne spent all the money she had with her to take lessons from her in her kitchen.

Joanne doing calligraphy exercises in New York.

When she returned to Singapore, a friend found a rental space in Shaw Towers and asked her if she wanted to share the space and rent. It would be a space they could use to try out any ideas that they had.

The rent was cheap and so she took a plunge to quit her church job to give calligraphy a shot. She named her enterprise “The Letter J Supply”, as “J” could both refer to her name “Joanne” and her Saviour “Jesus”.

Joanne started playing around with visual art using a masking ink technique that she once used in her designs for church. It is a fluid that is used to mask off and protect areas of the paper from watercolour paint so that when it is peeled off, it reveals the white paper underneath. Designs are created by painting the background boundary surrounding the negative space.

One day, when Joanne went to the store to stock up on masking ink, she was horrified to discover that they had run out of it.

An example of the masking ink technique.

Once back home, she began thinking about how to do her calligraphy artwork without having masking ink.

It was then that suddenly an idea to simply use the watercolour paintbrush to do the calligraphy strokes dropped into her head.

“As each letter required a few strokes, it allowed me to use different colours for different parts of the letter which blended into each other. On hindsight, it was God who gave me the idea of switching things up,” said Joanne.

From then on, her artwork became recognised for its colourful and fluid sensibility.

She started off with a calligraphy event and things took off from there. She began selling her artwork and running teaching workshops.

In the past, Joanne could not imagine speaking in front of strangers but she slowly grew in confidence as she began holding more and more workshops and pop-up events.

It was a busy first few years for her as she learnt the ropes of running a business and managing people relations.

In the midst of the hustle, her walk with God suffered.

“I was still creating Christian artwork by doing commissions of Bible verses but I often didn’t feel worthy. I knew I still wanted to create for God, yet I had a feeling there was something I was missing,” said Joanne.

“If I believed that words are powerful, do I truly believe what I was writing?” 

From the outside, her business looked like it was thriving. But by 2017, she started to experience dryness and burnout again. Doing artwork felt repetitive and she craved depth in her work.

The colourful calligraphy she produced started to feel repetitive over time.

In those years, everything felt like a closed door. She had a foreboding that the calligraphy trend and interest would start tapering off and so she began looking for other ways to grow her business.

However, her other business ideas such as conducting online courses did not take off and soon, Joanne moved out of her studio in town to save on rent.

Joanne moved out of her Seah Street studio after two years to save on rent.

“I had a distorted perspective of God. I felt He had the key to blessing my business and my life but He was withholding it from me.

“I thought I had to be perfect before God would bless me, and if I wasn’t having breakthroughs, maybe I was doing something wrong,” said Joanne.

Alluring her into the wilderness 

Yet, God continued to speak to her in those wilderness years through pictures. Going beyond words, Joanne began to find her creative expression of verses in pictorial and even abstract forms.

In 2019, she did a painting based on Hosea 2:14, where the Lord allures His people into the wilderness so that He can speak tenderly to her.

Joanne’s artistic expression of Hosea 2:14.

“It is not by accident that the Lord allures us to this dry land. When we are stripped of the things we have put our confidence in, our hearts are freed up to hear His tender voice and experience His love in a whole new way,” said Joanne.

During this time, she found new meaning in running workshops. Unlike in the past where she was so focused on making sure that they acquire the skills she was teaching, she began to view these sessions as a means to meet people to bless and encourage them.

Realising that many people who come for such workshops are looking to relax and find peace in their hearts, she would sometimes leave prophetic messages for the participants in envelopes. They each chose an envelope randomly, and she was heartened to see that some of their countenance changing after reading a word that spoke to the season that they were going through.

One of the workshops run by Joanne at Bynd Artisan, an artisan leather shop

In 2020, when the COVID pandemic shook the world, Joanne felt God prompting her to listen to the sermons of American preacher Andrew Wommack and the local evangelist Ps Joseph Prince. Their messages on the grace of God renewed her mind.

“Some truths that used to float through my head, started to really sink into my heart – that Jesus has redeemed me fully. My perspective of God slowly changed from a stern Father whom I need to obey to One who really loves me despite of my unworthiness.”

She continued: “I realised condemnation and torment came from being self-focused, instead of being conscious of the greatness of God. I now create because I am loved rather than me creating so that I can be loved.”

Joanne’s exhibition at the Esplanade in 2021.

Since 2021, Joanne has been drawn to painting abstract style.

Joanne’s ex-boss (above, with wife flanking Joanne) was seeking a Christian abstract artist to do a painting for his home. He ended up commissioning her to do one, thereby kickstarting her abstract art journey.

“It goes beyond words and realism. There is a sense of openness and freedom, reflecting my evolving relationship with the Lord,” said Joanne.  

“Art is powerful because when we create, we are revealing what’s really going on within us, versus using words which we tend to over-process,” she added.

The second abstract painting that was commissioned.

When she first started painting, Joanne was very conscious of what she was “releasing” through her works, especially if she was not at a good place with God at the time of painting.

“When I shared this with my cell leader, she was bewildered and said ‘In your weakness, His power is made perfect’. It’s so true, that we needn’t think we need to be good enough before we are ready to come before Him,” she said.

Joanne with her cell group.

Abstract painting appeals to her because she can express unspoken things, even the darkness, as she journeys with God.

“It’s not just about creating positive and happy art, but also not about depressive self- expression. The brushstrokes of the artist carry his or her journey, breakthroughs and intimacy with God. I wanted more depth in my art, so perhaps going through the wilderness also enabled me to produce something from that season that others can relate to.”

Click here to view more of Joanne’s art. 

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