For the month of July, an exhibition of contemporary New England landscape oil paintings by Christopher Volpe is featured at Vermont Artisans Gallery 2. Volpe is a “rogue art historian” who studied poetry in graduate school but found inspiration teaching and writing about the history of art.
The painting pictured was done in the Northampton Meadows on Memorial Day. Much of his work is done in and around the seacoast in New Hampshire, where he lives. Examples of his work can also be found at www.christophervolpe.com.
“American painters toward the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th used oil painting to express ‘poetic’ intuitions about being-in-the-world,” Volpe says. “After modernism and abstraction and two world wars, it seemed naive to go on using nature as a metaphor for experience. That judgment seems premature now, and we’re experiencing a renewed interest in representational painting as well as a general appreciation of the importance and preciousness of the natural world.”
Through July 31. Vermont Artisans Gallery 2, 106 Main St., Brattleboro, (802) 257-7044, www.buyvermont.com.
