September 15 – November 4, 2023

Reception Sept 15, 5-7pm

Our fall exhibit presents Joseph Salerno’s oil paintings. The show features a great range of Salerno’s work. Included will be pieces from his ‘Woods Edge’ & ‘Ridgeline’ Series, along with architectural, landscape, and still life paintings.

Salerno is an established painter who lives and works in Johnson, Vermont. Salerno has attended numerous drawing and painting workshops and residencies and taught art classes at universities in several states and abroad since the mid 80s. He has a meaningful and inspiring connection to Italy and France fostered by summer study programs, artist residencies, and family roots. He currently teaches at Northern Vermont University in Johnson.

Salerno is most in his element when he is painting alfresco, recording his experience outdoors with his oil paints, palette knife, and substrate. When the time is right he’ll make a plein air painting each day. With this regulated, rhythmic process he can capture the feeling and acute essence of his subjects day after day like in his ‘Woods Edge’ & ‘Ridgeline’ Series. He is adept at capturing a dramatic snapshot of the changing weather in the Vermont landscape- the vapors that rise after rains, clouds crowding and morphing over a mountain ridge, or the voids versus sunspots between trees that give them a relationship to one another.

In his work he explores opposition: abstraction & realism, deep & high tones, foreground & background, defined & blurred shapes. Salerno is a master of his tools and media. He often uses earth tone palettes, pulls the oil paint with his palette knife, and uses the edge of it for very delicate highlighted lines. These lines reveal texture from the substrate thus creating rich and subtle layered effects that shape and anchor the composition. The result is a real sensory pleasure to the observer.

The tender paintings aid the viewer to notice and begin to understand the overlooked nuance all around us. They’re not unlike poetry, of which Maria Popova relates that, ‘under its slow seduction, I came to see how it shines a sidewise gleam on the invisible and unnameable regions of being . . . Giving us an instrument for paying attention, which is how we learn to love the world more.’

In the exhibit there will be longviews on a sunny, Italian plain and also a sullen sheep in the dark of the barn. It’s all in the balance and the same knowledgeable skill and delicate treatment is evident throughout.

“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