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Torrington Savings Bank Gallery: August 16 – September 21, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, August 16, 6:00 – 8:00 pm
In-person Artist Talk: Friday, September 13, 6:30 PM
Artist Statement
Helen Conroy, my maternal grandmother, was born in Connemara, a region in the west of Ireland. Her family was poor, and when she was nineteen, Helen was told she could marry the pig farmer down the road or emigrate to the US. She chose the latter, and upon her arrival, traveled to St. Paul, Minnesota, where she worked as a maid in the Saint Paul Hotel, a grand and historic institution that is central to this old city’s identity to this day. She eventually met and married my grandfather, Thomas Barrett. Thomas died tragically when he was in his thirties, leaving my grandmother to raise their nine children on her own.
As a child, I spent a good deal of time with my grandmother; the relationship was formative. I have vivid memories, all very sensory, of the comforting smells of her house, slabs of home-made bread thick with butter and jam, and large cups of tea with milk and sugar. I remember, too, the sounds of her voice as she spoke its thick accented English. Even more interesting was hearing her speak in her native Irish, with its throaty vowels and sharp intakes of breath. She lived in the twentieth century, but also in the timelessness of myth. Fairies roamed her house and were blamed for any lost item; bad luck could be warded off with a quick Gaelic blessing.
In the past decade, I have been to Connemara several times, doing on-site paintings and drawings in Salalaoi in Ros Muc, my grandmother’s birthplace and, just west of there, the Roundstone Bog, a vast tract of low land covered with lakes and rock outcroppings. The motivation behind this work is twofold. First, I desire to make paintings that are an exploration of my own history, stemming from that formative relationship with my grandmother. More particularly, I want to understand how the choices she made as a young woman over 100 years ago, are so determinative of my understanding of who I am, historically and today. Second, and more broadly, I wish to explore how landscape painting can uniquely address larger issues of place, the passage of time, memory, and the construction of cultural and personal identity.
My process begins with repetitive observation—doing on-site studies in the same location and working from them in the studio for a year or longer. This allows me to fully experience and understand the intimacies of place: the particularities of light, atmosphere, land structures, and color. In particular, I am interested how these qualities change over time, how in the short term, how light and atmosphere change constantly over the course of the day. But, also, I wish to explore long-term, over the years, and even centuries or longer, how histories of people lived out in a location, as well as the physical, geological transformations that transpire, are all embedded somehow within the landscape.
How I make these paintings reflects this as they are constructed in layers, a process that is additive and reductive. I put the paint on, take it off, and wipe more away; there’s a lot of erasure. This imitates the way in which a landscape is altered by erosion and by layers buried over time.
I am less interested in creating a specific, fixed image of Connemara than one that is more suggestive of the essence of that place, the often-harsh histories that have played out there, the passage of time and embedded memories. It is this I hope to reveal: the landscape that is seen and that which is unseen or implied, suggesting the essence of place itself.
Joseph Byrne was born in St. Paul, MN in 1954. He has received awards and fellowships from the Butler Museum of American Art, the National Academy of Design, the MacDowell Colony, the American Academy in Rome, and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland, among others. He taught at Carleton College in Minnesota for fourteen years, and at Trinity College in Hartford, CT for twenty-three years where he is currently Emeritus Professor of Art having retired from teaching in 2022. Over the years he has lived in Minnesota, Iowa, New York City, Hanover, NH, Italy, and Ireland. Currently, he lives in West Hartford, CT with poet, Clare Rossini. They have a son Francis, a photographer living in Chicago, making work about that city.
Joseph Byrne
STUDIO: 1977 Park Road
Hartford, CT
860-796-4370
josephbyrnestudio.com
joseph.byrne@trincoll.edu
Education
1982 MFA in Painting, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA
1976 BA in Art, St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN
Teaching
2022-present Emeritus Professor of Art, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
2000-2022 Professor of Art, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
1986-1999 Professor of Art, Carleton College, Northfield, MN
1993-1994 Visiting Associate Professor of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH
Selected Recent and Upcoming Exhibitions
2022 Connemara Paintings, Widener Gallery, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
(one-person, catalog available)
2020 Landscape and Memory: Irish Paintings, Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
(one-person) POSTPONED—TBD
2018 Of the Landscape, Joseph Byrne, Elizabeth Meyersohn, Susan Finnegan,
Widener Gallery, Trinity College, Hartford CT
2018 Side by Side, Joseph Byrne, John Willis, Susan Finnegan< Dudley Zoppe,
Washington Art Association, Washington Depot, CT
2017 Connemara Landscapes, Five Points Gallery, Torrington, CT (one-person)
2017 Interplay: Joseph Byrne& Elizabeth Gourlay, Maxwell Shepherd Memorial
Invitational Exhibition, Gallery on the Green, Canton, CT (two-person)
2016 Earth, Rock, Water, Sky: New Paintings, Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
(one-person)
2016 In and of the Land, Five Points Gallery, Torrington, CT (curated group)
2013 Poetic Still Life, Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (one-person)
2011 Drawing Dialogue, Hartford Art School, West Hartford, CT (two-person)
2010 Connemara Landscapes, Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (one-person)
2009 Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (one-person)
2008 Power of Two: Drawings, St.Olaf College Art Museum, Northfield, MN
2008 Small Takes, First Street Gallery, New York, NY
2008 Outside the Box: Zeuxis Paints the Landscape, Delaware College of Art
and Design, Wilmington, DE
2007 Still Life Group Show, Lori Bookstein Gallery, New York, NY
2007 Focus Hartford: A Collection of Works on Paper, Paper/New England,
West Hartford, CT
2006 Zeuxis: Facets of Perception, Weigand Gallery, Notre Dame de Namur
University, Belmont, CA; Newhouse Center for Contemporary Arts, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY
2006 Does It Work for Me Anymore? Drawings by Joseph Byrne, Charles
Cajori, Barbara Grossman, and John Willis, Gallery on the Green,
Canton, CT
2006 Trees, Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
2005 Poetic Dimensions in the Modern Still Life, curated by Gabriel
Laderman, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY; Kouros Gallery,
NY, NY
2004 Watercurrents, Kouros Gallery, NYC, NY
2004 Zeuxis: Tabletop Arenas, Colby Museum of Art, Waterville, ME; Lori
Bookstein Gallery, NY, NY; University of New Hampshire,
Durham, NH
2003 Washington Art Association, Washington Depot, CT (one-person)
2003 Trees, Paesaggio Gallery, West Hartford, CT
2002 Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (one-person)
2002 Prospects, 6 Painters and the Landscape, Denise Bibro Art, NY, NY
2001 Watercolor: Five Painters, George Billis Gallery, NY, NY
Prizes, Awards and Fellowships
2023 Artist Residency, Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annaghmakerrig, Ireland
2009 Faculty Research Grant, Trinity College, Hartford, CT
1992 Resident Fellow, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT
1991 Artist-in-Residence, American Academy in Rome, Rome. Italy
1990 Faculty Development Grant, Carleton College, Northfield, MN
1986 MacDowell Colony Fellowship, MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, NH
1984 Julius Halgarten Prize for Best Painting by an Artist under 35, National Academy
Of Design, New York, NY
Gallery Representation
Groveland Gallery, Minneapolis, MN
