Joan Fear

Joan Elizabeth Fear (; 2 April 1932 – 11 October 2022) was a New Zealand artist and teacher, known for her paintings of Waikato landscapes and portraits. She began exhibiting her work in the 1960s after joining the Waikato Society of Arts (later becoming a life member and patron of the society). In the 1980s she was able to leave her job working as a schoolteacher and become a full-time artist. She continued to paint into her later years; an exhibition was hosted in 2012 by the Waikato Museum to mark her 80th birthday.

Early life and family Fear was born on 2 April 1932 in Raglan, and raised on a farm in nearby Kauroa . She was the sixth of nine children of Jessie Gibbison (née Carr) and Frank Gibbison. Her mother had worked as a governess and her father had fought at Gallipoli in World War I before returning home to run the family farm. Fear attended Kauroa School and Raglan District High School. and her paintings were featured in a 1962 exhibition. In 1964 she donated paintings to the University of Waikato which had not previously had an art collection. Her first solo exhibition was in 1965 at the Hamilton City Art Gallery and featured paintings of landscapes near Raglan such as Whale Bay. In 1972 she founded the Waikato Society of Arts (WSA) Arts School, which continues to operate . In 1999 she collaborated with other Waikato artists on an exhibition about time and mortality at the ArtsPost gallery.

Later life and death Fear's later solo exhibitions included Acclimatised in 2002, Four Decades of Painting by an Otago Regionalist in 2004 hosted by the University of Waikato and Indigenous in 2008, which featured paintings of New Zealand native flora and fauna.

In the 2006 New Year Honours she was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to the arts. She was also a patron of the Waikato Society of Arts, and was made a life member in 1996. After her death, Wilson said she was the greatest Waikato painter of the 20th century, and that "her ability to mould and shape paint was exemplary and sculptural and beautiful and was deeply informed by not just what she saw but by intuiting and interpreting nature".