Joseph Paquet
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To make you see what I have seen is part of my objective; but, to have you feel what I have felt is the ultimate goal. Capturing an effect is capturing the emotion of a place, time or a moment. The more specific the moment, the more singular the emotion."

Joe Paquet believes that nature is selective about to whom she reveals her secrets. "You can't be an egotist and conduit at the same time," he says. "I believe the depths of nature can only be plumbed through humility. The moment ego overrides that, the door to true understanding shuts."

He goes on: "The parade of seasons with their simultaneous, multilayered challenges of drama, value, shape, color and character keep me in a constant state of awe. Anyone who says, 'it's been done before,' has not seen for themselves the changes which take place in a simple field from season to season. The great joy is learning to see subtly. To elevate the common place and make people take another look at what they generally take for granted — that's what interests me.

While pursuing a BFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Joe had the good fortune of finding a mentor in John Foote who opened his eyes to the exquisiteness and joy of drawing the human figure. After graduating Joe met another major influence in his life, John Osborne. Osborne worked in a small former train station that served as his classroom and studio. Joe was thunderstruck to find there large canvases filled with poetic, powerful landscapes. When he asked him where they were painted, Osborne would say "Oh, New England," or "at the shore." Joe had no idea that they were painted largely from Osborne's imagination. "Later, when he told me, I didn't believe it was possible. He challenged me to take a class and see what it was all about. He suggested his Sunday outdoor class and Thursday evening indoor class. A landscape class indoors? I soon found out."

The goal was to work from nature or from studies gathered from nature. Transcribing nature was one thing, but working from memory was quite another. Soon Joe was asking himself a totally different set of questions; questions conceived in the studio while struggling to interpret and enlarge outdoor studies. General proportion, the character of edge and shape, the true understanding of form and prismatic light and color as value. "The intellectual process became married to the intuitive. Paint what you know as well as what you see."

Osborne taught Joe to think and solve his own problems. "Having had so many instructors who taught by rote, it was a frustrating and painful time of learning. He rephrased my questions back at me, so I was forced to figure them out myself."

The results of those labors opened up avenues of expression Joe wouldn't have believed possible. "If I have the need or desire to move a mountain, add a figure or change the course of a river, I can do so. I am no longer shackled to nature. Now, I am painting my picture."

Joe Paquet teaches and paints at Hurinenko and Paquet Studio in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a member of the Salmugundi Club, New York, The California Art Club and is a Signature Member of the Plein Air Painters of America. He has been featured in an October 1995 article in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, the Spring 1999 issue of the Classical Realism Journal, the May 2002 issue of The Artist Magazine, the March 2004 issue of American Artist and received the Artists Choice Award at the 2001 Laguna Beach Plein Air Invitational.