Artist Information
Joseph Bellacera
"I paint the landscape because it is the most immediate world I know."
I paint the landscape because it is the most immediate world I know. I walk on it, I breathe it, I feel the textures and atmosphere and never tire of the light and the horizon. Where I live is a causeway. Sometimes it is land; sometimes it's flooded. The sky in this area often presents an uncommon spatial vastness and drama of light. Every day, even every hour, the view is different.
I remember the first time I visited the area in late August expecting to see only brown, dried grasses and weeds. Instead I discovered the most glorious fields of wildflowers in a wetland setting full of birds. You can't judge the area by the few minutes it takes to drive across the causeway. You have to get down, close up and hike or drive around the area, especially the preserve.
To me the landscape is always fluid, the light always changing. To move through it is to experience a multi-dimensional world full of surprises where our usual labels only deaden the experience. So, the fluidity of paint is a good medium to express this. My style of painting hovers on the edge of abstraction in order to retain this sense of immediacy and movement and hopefully convey it that way to you, the viewer.
