Joseph Salerno

Joseph Salerno is a painter who lives and works in Johnson, Vermont. He makes a small plein air landscape painting each day in the Vermont woods.

Amy Lilly, in her SevenDays review of ‘Dark Woods’ at the Vermont Studio Center wrote: “These works capture not nature per se but a kind of abstraction of presence. Seen from a distance, certain trees appear to be grounded in, perhaps, a yellow-green ground cover or rust-red drifts of leaves, but up close there is no such particularity. The trunks vary from vaguely shadowed to completely flat; some bisect the painting like stripes. In these, often, the bar of darkness between two trunks appears to emerge as a third column, a negative-space presence in itself. It is rare to see a show that so finely balances abstraction and figuration, falling into neither category unequivocally.”

“I hope to remake the landscape in paint, to capture its lush and sensual qualities. I want to find the poetry in the way clouds roll along a mountain ridge or obscure it in the fog, the elegance of the mist lifting from the mountains. Each painting represents a conversation: between paint, brush, surface, the landscape, the day, the weather, the season, my mood, and past paintings both my own and others. The paintings exist as transcendent images; thoughts, portals to scenes observed or remembered, fleeting moments, glimpsed views, or perhaps even portraits in a way; as records of the experience of seeing, of the process of invention and the delight of paint.”   ~Joseph Salerno

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