Constance LaPalombara
Stephen Kobasa Photo
Constance LaPalombara, Eventide, 2010, Oil on linen on board
It was summer afternoon light on a wall on a New Haven street that I recognized which first drew me to Constance LaPalombara’s painting. Here was a city emptied, not by disaster, but by customs of rest in the day’s heat, as if the colors had been transposed from some stuccoed Venetian palace. It was no surprise then, that LaPalombara made pictures in Italy, too. Everywhere she stopped, she was transcribing a place’s conversations with the sun.
Stephen Kobasa Photo
Constance LaPalombara, Untitled, 2010, Oil on paper on board
But these Maine paintings move even closer to the surface of things within a confined frame which magnifies the weight of stone and water. With some of the same unnerving clarity that Edward Hopper fashioned in a series of small-scale oils he made of similar subjects, these are pages from a lesson book on how the sea colors itself upon the canvas of the land.
Additional images here.
Contact the artist .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). at clapalombara(at)hotmail(dot)com
They remind me of the paint by numbers painting I did as a boy.