The Color of Light- Finding Luminosity With Pigment Color
Rita's motivation is to explore ways of getting the same luminosity into her paintings as seen in nature on a sunny day. What is the connection between sun light and pigment color ? How do we see paint color? When asked about her work Rita will describe the sensation of light in paint using the three properties of color; hue, value, and intensity interchangeably to create an overall glow of light and enhance object color . Baragona uses chromatic color relationships along with warm to cool colors, tonal value, and simultaneous contrast to create a visual vocabulary with a range of naturalistic responses to observation.
Artist’s Statement and Reviews In Baragona's flower and garden paintings, colors act upon each other, creating light. Connecting energy and matter, the sensation and reflection of inner joy surround the viewer. Beneath the surface imagery of Baragona's floral paintings and oceans is a personal life-affirming connection with nature. Jed Perl wrote in Art in America, “What a nature painter must do is to impose some human logic or private poetry on the natural world. By this measure Baragona is a very interesting painter.” Baragona is a perceptual colorist. Baragona works directly from nature. She gathers information visually filtering it through her sensibility to arrive at a personal spiritual aesthetic. Her goal is to describe the flow of time in space,which informs figuration. Jed Perl says in The New Criterion, “Baragona builds small, powerful structures without seeming to do much at all. The results are miniaturized visions of paradise.” In another review he says, ”Flower painting becomes a metaphor for painting itself, color-as-form.”
Brief Biography Educated at Carnegie Mellon, NYU and the New York Studio School, Rita Baragona is an artist /teacher, who paints the landscapes and still life of flowers in rural, Warren County, New Jersey. She teaches art at Blair Academy and co-directs the Romano Gallery. For the past six summers she has been teaching a oil and acrylic painting workshop at the Faribanks Summer Arts Festival, in Fairbanks Alaska. She has had numerous one person shows including at the Bowery Gallery, NYC and exhibited widely in the USA. Most recently she and her husband showed at Rider University. Her work is in collections including Rider University and Bryn Mawr College. Other solo shows were at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Washington Art Association, East Stroudsburg University, and the Dutot Museum. Selected group shows include Kouros Gallery, Borgenicht Gallery and Midtown Payson Gallery, NY; Well Street Gallery, Fairbanks, AK; Fairleigh Dickinson University and Rider University, NJ; Lyme Academy, CT; Tallahassee Gallery, FL; Bryn Mawr College and Allentown Museum, PA; Baltimore Museum.
Contact: Rita may be contacted via email at: baragr@nac.net
Rita is currently exhibiting at the Bowery Gallery in New York City from Dec 1 to Jan 2, 2010. www.bowerygallery.org