Joe Flaherty

Artist Statement:

I make paintings that aim at being curious, mysterious and peculiar before they aim at being representational, affirmative or beautiful. My paintings usually consist of many layers, each layer obstructing, suppressing, camouflaging, barricading and sometimes concealing layers beneath. The idea is to develop texture over the whole painting's surface as well as create little windows revealing some of the under painted layers, like islands of palimpsest.

The word “palimpsest" was originally used to describe the practice of effacing text in a document in order to reuse the expensive writing surface, be it velum or papyrus or other costly material. Over time, the effaced marks showed through the over layer as a sort of ghost of past activity. For me, it offers a vehicle for the “happy accident" that, in an instant, enhances a painting. Palimpsest is also a metaphor for how the world is actually structured. Examples abound: the layers of rock and sediment that make up the earth's crust, the Indian garden discovered in a remote wood, the skeleton of an abandoned foundation discovered at an excavation site, the youthful impishness revealed in the smile of an old man.

When an observant painter views a scene, the painter takes atmospheric conditions, the quality and the angle of light into consideration as well as the shapes and local colors of objects. But our view of scenes is also affected by the atmospheric conditions in our minds and spirits. Lenses and screens through which we observe the world also abound. Our experiences, store of knowledge, beliefs, preferences, prejudices also affect what we see. The layers that I apply to my paintings are attempts to account for all types of intermediate screens, filters or lenses that lie between our concept of an image and the image itself.

I usually start a painting with a ground that captures the color that dominates my thinking about the subject at hand followed by a simple image. I then use a variety of techniques, tools and marking materials to create layers over the original image. Some techniques are scratching, collage, wandering and loopy line marking as well as glazing, I like to use a variety of brushes, pens, palette knives, but especially masonry tools, to make marks and I work with house paint, ink, charcoal, graphite, acrylic and especially oil paints.

I would hope that my paintings, when viewed from a room length distance, gladden the eye with bold colors, and intricate and pleasant lines and shapes that invite the viewer to look closer.

If one of my paintings succeeds in inviting closer inspection, I would like viewers to get close enough so that their peripheral vision is absorbed, to stick their noses right up to a painting to find patterns of texture and some vestiges of the many under paintings lurking in islands of palimpsest. I would hope these explorations somehow stimulate the mind, not in a “Where's Waldo" sense of looking for something one knows is there, but in a heuristic discovery, an “aha" moment.

Finally, my hope is that viewers' contemplation of observed patterns, relationships, concealments and revelations in some way lift the spirit by conveying different ways of looking at the world with its illumination and its many real and imagined obstructing, suppressing, camouflaging, barricading and sometimes concealing layers.

I am largely self-taught, although I have taken some courses and seminars recently and studied studio art in my early years.

Sept. 1962-3 Fine Arts major CCNY
Feb. 2015: Oil Painting, Phoenix Center for the Arts with Edna Dapo.
May 2015: Juried into the New Hampshire Art Association
2017 and 2019: Work Shops at Sanctuary Arts with Tom Glover

Education:

Sept. 1962-3 Fine Arts major CCNY
Feb. 2015: Oil Painting, Phoenix Center for the Arts with Edna Dapo.
May 2015: Juried into the New Hampshire Art Association
2017 and 2019: Work Shops at Sanctuary Arts with Tom Glover

Exhibitions:

I have exhibited at:
-Robert Lincoln Levy Gallery, Portsmouth, NH since having been juried into the New Hampshire Art Association in 2012
-Prescott Park Art Festival, Portsmouth, NH—Honorable Mention
-The Mills, Newmarket, NH—People's Choice Award
-Vibe Gallery, Somersworth, NH
-100 Market Gallery, Portsmouth, NH, prize winner in 2019
-Hayley Gallery, Eliot, ME
-Two of my paintings have been reproduced in the 2018 and 2020 Artists of the Seacoast calendars.
-“The Maternity Series" hangs in Yale New Haven Hospital's High Risk Maternity Center and Yale University's Women's Center.
 

Artistic Influences:

Milton Avery and Helen Frankenthaler for color field composition.
Willem de Kooning and Joan Miro for independence.
Brice Marden and Terry Winters for use of line.

Artist Tags:

Abstact, colorful, large, contemporary.