Joseph Barbieri

Joseph Barbieri is best known for his intricately detailed, color saturated and irreverent portraits of anthropomorphic creatures. His second stream of paintings is delicate, lyrical landscapes.

His creatures are engaged in leisurely pursuits: painting plein air, flying antique planes, dressing for dinner, lolling by the pool. While they superficially appear to resemble us, they're far more unwittingly absorbed into their own peculiar world than we are.

The landscapes, done in Italy, Antigua, and Maine, are soft and muted and are suffused with the warm air and sun of their settings. Barbieri spends most of his vacation painting en plein air.

Barbieri trained at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His paintings have been exhibited at such venues as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the National Academy of Design in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

“My current interest in bird-like images continues. I call them ducks, although many of them don't look like ducks. There are several paintings where the ducks look like large wading birds usually standing in the water. Other ducks are flying, sometimes as pilots of airplanes. The ducks are usually clothed, though not always, and very bright oil colors with crisp edges are the norm. The deeper meaning of the paintings might be found in the imagination of the viewer.

An entirely different kind of work are landscapes, mostly done on an island in Maine, and on other islands much further south, i.e. Antigua and the Bahamas, and also from trips to Italy, where Pienza in Tuscany has been a favorite subject. I find the landscapes a nice change from being in the studio doing intensely detailed work, to being outside and painting in a freer way.

Some may find this dichotomy between styles puzzling, but I don't at all, having done this during my student days at The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Art and later when I lived in Florence for a year.” - Joseph Barbeiri