Absolutely Real but Not Photographic
By Bob Bahr
One of the reasons Joe Paquet’s oil paintings are so successful is because he knows precisely what he wants them to do — offer a “heightened experience without exaggeration.”
The artist traces this approach back to an exhibition of Russian painter Isaac Levitan’s work that was on view years back in Washington, D.C. “I had an epiphany looking at Levitan’s work, especially Evening on the Volga,” says Paquet. “My jaw dropped. That painting had no exaggeration in it. None. It was so sensitively observed that exaggeration was unnecessary. I felt like I had been barking up the wrong tree.”
Exaggeration of what the artist sees in the subject matter is a form of subjectivity, and Paquet feels that while “sound subjective choices heighten the experience in a very personal way,” to approach a scene more objectively is preferable. It may seem that a scene in nature could feel restrictive compared to an artist’s imagination, but he offers a different view.
“I don’t want to completely disappear as the artist, but I am finite,” he says. “The more the painting becomes about the artist and not about something else, the more likely the artist’s work will feel repetitive. If you work too much inside your skull, you start to repeat yourself. Plein air is the opportunity for all of us to wake up to the idea that every day is different. Certain painters stand out from those around them, and they are the ones with extraordinary sensitivity to what’s in front of them.
“For me, a lot of exaggeration proves far less important than the sensitivity to what is actually there. I’m a student, studying all the time — a forensic painter. I pay attention to the little differences within his shapes, and I’m honest about it. Cleverness has never appealed to me, compared to honesty.”
His guiding light for truthfulness in painting is Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796–1875), especially Corot’s plein air work. “I admire the absolute honesty of early Corot, the sensitivity of Levitan [1860–1900], the intentionality of James McNeill Whistler [1834–1903], and the selective choice-making of Edward Hopper [1882–1967],” he says.
The Artist’s Approach
Paquet’s process is traditional. He scouts out a location and observes various times of day there. When the conditions are favorable, he goes on site and makes thumbnail sketches. Once satisfied with the design of the potential painting, he returns at the right time in the right weather to start a piece by drawing with vine charcoal. He uses a neutral warm, such as a combination of raw umber and lead white, to tone his canvas. Then he dives in, using a prismatic palette like the one used by his mentor, John Phillip Osborne. All that follows embraces one of Paquet’s favorite conceptual pairs: unity and variety. “If you achieve maximum variety while achieving maximum unity, there is a possibility of something really beautiful,” he says.
When tackling a complicated composition on a large canvas — a scale Paquet has favored for almost four years — sometimes a bit more drawing is necessary, as in Furrows and First Snow. Authenticity demanded careful sketching, even if this meant quite a bit of work. “Those furrows have small wiggles, not straight lines,” he points out. “I drew for three hours. I felt like the top of my head was going to fly off.” Even so, the artist avoids straightforward rendering.
“I don’t render my way through a problem,” he says. “I organize large and small shapes in hierarchical fashion to create harmony. The further you develop your masses, and the more eloquently you paint them, the better it will be. You must see, not just copy things. Rendering is tedious and predictable. The proximity of opposites creates the greatest excitement. Consider the transitions of colors and values. Ask yourself questions. How are you organizing that shape, and is it leading the eye, trapping the eye, exciting the eye, or putting the eye to sleep? In pure design, there is a hierarchy to it.”
Paquet moves around and paints all over the canvas as the piece develops. His inspiration in part is a quote from Corot in which the artist said that a piece should grow all over, much like a child blows up a balloon.
Paquet has little patience for dead or inactive areas on a canvas. He quotes Robert Henri, who wrote, “A person living in squalor eventually gets used to it.” Paquet identifies this with lax drawing and color mixing, but the concept has legs that can go other places. For him, it’s a question of caring about every inch of the canvas, not just the parts the artist might find precious. “If you can do it this well over here, why not do it that well over there in the painting?” he asks.
“You must have intentionality with every stage of the painting. That, to me, is profound. What we do is potentially a sacred thing. Every aspect matters. From tone to drawing to seeing light — all of these things are not impediments. They are to be embraced. Toning a canvas is a form of meditation or prayer. This is amazing to me.”
A Hierarchy of Information
A developing artist may fall into another morass in this area. When is there too much information? When is one spending too much time on one area? For Paquet, it’s when the hierarchy of elements breaks down, and the focal point(s) lose their punch in the ensuing competition for the viewer’s eye. He believes that a good start on the painting can help avoid the morass, but it doesn’t stop there. “When blocking in a painting, I’m always asking what specific thing I’m after,” says the artist. “The better that start is, the closer it is to being finished. It’s important to remember that everything is important, but not everything is of equal importance when you are designing.”
So how does one treat all parts of the canvas with great care and yet retain a hierarchy of elements? Paquet says he works hard to paint optically, which in part means painting a scene the way the human eye sees it. Our eyes focus on one plane in the depth of field, with planes closer and further away blurring.
“I make an appraisal of what’s in my peripheral vision,” Paquet explains. “I make very conscious choices about a focal area, but as I spiral out of that area, I work to get a diminishment of information, a suppression of intense color, and a compression of value. It’s tricky. This effect is visible in Brooklyn With Barrel. When he was painting this piece on site, the enormous number of details in all the background buildings threatened to seize up the process. “I thought to myself, ‘I’ll just take a photo and put all those little windows in, in the studio,’” he recalls. “But I resisted that. Instead, I stared at the stanchion of the bridge and observed how many windows I saw to the immediate right of that.” This diminishment of information strengthened his focal point: the bridge.
The Scale of Things
Bridges, walls, houses, and roads populate Paquet’s paintings, showing the impact and relationship of humans to their environment, but actual figures are rare, and for good reason. Paquet looks to Whistler for reinforcement on this stance, pointing out that Whistler refused to paint narrative paintings. “When you add figures to a painting, it changes the painting completely, and it very easily becomes a painting about the figures,” Paquet asserts.
But he will put one in simply for a sense of scale or as a compositional element. He recalls a Whistler piece in which there is a figure, but it is in shadow, in a doorway. The figure does add something to the work, but it does not dominate it or suggest much of a story. In a Paquet painting, there is plenty of room for detail, but it must know its place and relative importance.
His work has had even more room for information since 2020. The pandemic encouraged Paquet to tackle something that had stoked his curiosity. “I wanted to see what was possible if I painted large,” he says. “Scale changes everything. A large painting is like a picture window on the wall. I’m not a kid anymore, so I wanted to push it and challenge myself.”
Paquet’s decision to work all over the canvas as it progresses becomes harder when the paintings approach three or four feet in width. “It’s very hard to take in the entirety of the canvas when you’re working and to be aware of all that surface while you’re painting,” he says. “You have to hold on to the effect you want and be very specific about that. You must be sensitive to the harmonies you see while in front of nature. The color and value transitions are over broader areas, and you must be careful not to over-model the forms. If you get up close to one of my large paintings, the calligraphy of the painting is apparent, and the effect is abstract. The concert of calligraphic marks suggests an objective truth. It is absolutely real, but not photographic at all.”
A Sense of Truth
So while Paquet urges painters to “honor every one of those trees” in their paintings, he also stresses that the way to do that is often by examining the relationships between the trees or the adjacent elements of the scene. “How different is that thing from the thing next to it?” he asks. “You can go as deep into that as you want to. That’s a skill, like building muscle. There’s an elasticity to our awareness that can be stretched, but it’s hard to do. There’s a reason why there is tension in things that are elastic. The key is to push yourself and expand the amount of time that you are really present to what is in front of you. This will open you up. You will be seeing more, all of the time.”
His affinity for the unique character of objects in the landscape powers the sense of truth and, perhaps, the love that he holds for creation, be it human-made or natural. In addition to honoring every tree, Paquet notes and sensitively presents traits of things, such as the sag of the railroad bridge in Trestle Shadow.
“There is something to that,” says the artist. “I try to honor the things in front of me for what they are. It’s like being kind to everybody — you honor their humanity. I was struck by the character of that wall. That sag in the bridge came from countless trains going over it. And it is specific. I am painting that wall, at that time of day.”
It’s a lucky wall that gets noticed by Joe Paquet.