Please join us on Third Thursday, July 20th, from 5 - 7 pm in the Camden location at 36 Bay View Street for the opening reception of PAINTERLY with Ted Keller and Christine Lafuente. Giacomo will be with us in spirit from Piacenza, Italy.

Christine Lafuente masterfully mixes color and tone to create harmony in her exquisite paintings. A lover of music, she often uses musical analogies when working and teaching. Her still life paintings are lush, liquid interpretations of compositions she arranges in her North light filled studio. "I work exclusively from natural light because of the way it creates and dissolves forms into color fields and tonal notes." She combines vases of soft, graceful blooms with sculptural elements like saltshakers, cups or clocks. The resulting paintings are color saturated and contemplative -they hold the viewer for a long time as elements begin to appear and resolve in the brushwork.

"A painting should be a poetic response to a visual experience. I often work in series as a way to play with composition. I often return to subjects again and again as a way to mark the passing of time." Christine's landscape paintings are relatively tonalist; she paints the light she perceives in unobstructed, calm scenes. The landscape paintings are spare and atmospheric. The palette of each landscape painting is a direct response to its specific location. In painting the landscape, she identifies the temperature of the light and pays attention to the color shifts as she moves away from it, looking for deeper saturation in the shadow areas. She plays with saturation in a tonal way, a technique that Matisse often used. These painterly, fluid works are a new cohesive grouping created by a skilled and seasoned career painter.

Giacomo Mazzari paints the colors, or clothes, of the seasons in a palette that seems to depict the atmosphere. He stands discretely in the background, relaxed and immersed in memory; this is how he puts paint to canvas - Mazzari's paintings portray, in silence, the beauty we live in and with. Sometimes combining still life with landscape, he marries the two with foreground/background play that is not competitive, but compositionally balanced and pleasing.

Giacomo Mazzari started painting in 1970’s Italy, which was an era of political tension. In 1968 there was a reawakening of the Italian working class that opened up a pre-revolutionary time. The 1970’s marked a period of austerity and being out on the weekends was not an option, so, to pass the time, Giacomo decided to aquire painting materials. Being an architect, he was already a skilled draftsman with a strong interest in art. He advanced quickly copying master’s works by impressionist and macchiaioli painters, a group of radical Italian painters in the mid 1800s who did much of their painting in natural light outdoors, straying from the classical art of the time. The country was having a renaissance, and the work focused on traditions and scenes of rural life in “patches” of color. Giacomo was influenced and inspired by this work and in 1980, after many years of honing his craft, he felt ready and had his first solo show at the Municipal Library of Rivergaro. He has since had many solo shows in Europe, and is now represented in the U.S. by Carver Hill Gallery.
Giacomo likes to listen to classical music when he paints, preferably Beethoven, Vivaldi, and Verdi.

Giacomo was born in Agazzano, Italy in 1941 and lives in Rivergaro, in the province of Piacenza. He graduated with a degree in architecture from the Politecnico di Milano and has devoted himself to painting as a self-taught artist since 1970.

Ted Keller will join Giacomo and Christine with architectural landscapes of Maine and New York created with a level of playfulness and sensitivity that make his paintings unusual. Ted likes to keep his head out of the work, putting paint down intuitively before his thoughts interfere with his process. He sometimes refers to photographs but often paints scenes from memory; therefore altering or changing the landscape as he sees fit. He exploits his compositions with exaggerated angles, often lengthening or foreshortening areas to create interest and even humor. These techniques make the work "uniquely Keller" and his paintings are easily identifiable. The palette is often soft with shocks of color mixed in, and the work feels alive. There is always movement in his work, and the energy is palpable and almost audible. Ted is a career artist in his 70's who is wildly creative and a joy to watch work. He was the first artist to be chosen for our gallery nearly 20 years ago and we are always excited to see the new work he contributes.

PAINTERLY runs through Saturday, August 12, 2023.

installation / opening images