Having studied art and illustration, Joy Stanley Ricketts graduated from Birmingham College of Art in 1951. She then worked for some years as a set and costume designer for theatre and television before estalishing a reputation, over thirty years, as an equestrian portrait and landscape painter.

A more recent development has been in the field of miniature painting where her work covers a variety of traditional subjects regularly including portraiture, wildlife and animal compositions.

She also paints original miniatures after the old masters for serious collectors in the dollshouse world. A number of these are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Art in Naples, Florida, the Puppenhausmuseum, Basel and Kay Browning's museum collection in Kentucky.