Kenise Barnes Fine Art is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of contemporary landscape painting featuring Thomas Sarrantonio and Amy Talluto. Both Sarrantonio and Talluto live and work in Ulster County, New York where a rich tradition and history of landscape painting both informs and inspires their work. The artists can frequently be spotted in the woods and meadows painting and drawing.
The paintings of Thomas Sarrantonio seek to mediate between realms of external perception and internal reflection. They present themselves as meditations on nature and self. Choosing humble, often overlooked subject matter, such as the overgrown grasses at the edge of a field, he attempts to translate the dynamic processes of nature into the stasis of physical matter on a painted surface. Small oil paintings are produced directly from nature while large paintings are studio productions that utilize memory, experience, imagination and conceptual ideas to negotiate the terrain of contemporary painting. The paintings are offered to the viewer as templates to provoke active participation in the process of seeing and quiet contemplation of the act of consciousness.
Thomas Sarrantonio’s paintings have been exhibited widely and he is the recipient of numerous honors including a Pollock-Krasner Award and a Visiting Artist Residency in Normandy, France. Sarrantonio holds degrees in Biology and English. He studied Painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA where his teachers included Will Barnet and Sidney Goodman. He lives and works in Rosendale, NY.
Amy Talluto has long focused on landscape painting and drawing. Her subjects include the wild environments of Wyoming and Montana, and the forested landscape of Upstate New York. Talluto is interested in using the tradition of landscape painting to explore emotions and ideas through brushwork, color and composition. Through her paintings she mines the feelings of anxiety and relief that exist side-by-side. Her painting technique alternates between dense, hyper-detailed painting and areas of light breathe-ability where the viewer might detect visible underpainting or raw canvas. In her landscapes tree branches twist and writhe, naturalistic colors turn acidic, and the sky flattens to meet form and then recedes into space again. Her depictions of trees, and shadows have anthropomorphic deformities hinting at animism and the natural world’s deeper mysteries ultimately creating puzzle-locking compositions that confuse the appearance of flatness and space, and of the real and imagined.
Talluto’s work has been widely exhibited throughout the United States. She was awarded residencies at Ucross, WY and Vermont Studio Center Residency among others. Amy Talluto earned a BFA from Washington University, St. Louis, MO and an MFA from School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. She lives and works in Hurley, NY.
