Gallery Photo
“Cafe,” oil on board.
Constance LaPalombara has painted hundreds of cityscapes of New Haven, and not a single human being is any of them. Sometimes New Haven is not even recognizable in them.
While Mitchell Drive, East Rock, the Star Supply Building on Upper State Street, the city’s profile from Lighthouse Point, and many other Elm City locales and landmarks remain easily recognizable, that’s not what the paintings are about.
Allan Appel Photo
That’s because her true subject is light. In Place, a new show of her works at Westville’s DaSilva Gallery, it plays a focal role: Beyond the local geography, she would dearly like viewers to see the light.
There are 24 mostly small-scale oils on canvas that LaPolambara (pictured below) has executed either from her Willow Street studio, on location around town, or,en plein air. The works are often also based on color studies, drawings, or visual research she has made during brief visits, on foot or from her car. Sometimes there is also a photograph involved.
“But never a photo alone,” she said. “You don’t have the sense of air you need in a painting.”
Air and light are tough butterflies to catch in art, but that’s the elusive game LaPolambara has been after ever since her initial days painting in Italy, where she fell under the sway of her hero painters, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot and Giorgio Morandi..
She still goes to Umbria in the summer time, and returns to New Haven in the cooler weather. That’s why you don’t see much green in her work, she pointed out.
LaPalombara is among a handful of local painters — William Meddick, Mike Angelis, J.D. Richey, and Frank Bruckman (currently showing at Kehler Liddell Gallery) come to mind — who often feature Elm City city scenes in their work. So I pressed her on two matters that have intrigued me: Why none of us human New Haveners are in her pictures, and what New Haven as a city has meant to her as an artist.
Gallery Photo
“Clouds Over New Haven,” oil on board.
Over the years painting outdoors in town, she said, she has had many agreeable encounters with New Haveners. She’s amused, often, at how mothers or caregiivers with small children hush up the little ones when they pass by her at her easel, as if an intense concentration — on a street corner! — might be broken up by little kid chatter.
“I love it when kids come up. One came up and said, ‘You don’t have enough yellow.’ I added it, and it was good,” she recollected.
Another time she was painting outdoors and a man came up to her and said, “Can you paint my truck?”
She thought, at first, that he wanted her to put his truck in the canvas she was working on. She would have been agreeable, but it turned out he wanted her actually to paint his truck. “I said ‘I’m not that kind of painter,’” she said.
She added that, from the very beginning of her career, “It never occurred to me to put a human being in there.”
She puts it more formally in an artist’s statement: “The challenge is to understand the color of light. My goal is to create pictorial light, to understand the color of light particularly the color of light in shadow. In this way I aim to create a sense of place that speaks beyond the physicality of the paint.”
“New Haven has given back” as an old city, LaPalombara explained as we walked through the galleries. She is drawn to old buildings, with their brick and their lines and greater articulation. There are very few modern buildings in her work; gentrification is a kind of beast stalking her locales. When she returned to one building, it was ply-boarded and awaiting the next step of demolition.
That’s why her newest work in the show brings out the shadow challenge even more than the light and shadow on buildings: it’s trees and their shadows on the sidewalks. “It’s a little ominous, the shadows of trees,” she said.
No “New Haven Aesthetic”
When people identify a building, bridge, or intersection, it doesn’t bother LaPalombara. Only “I hope people have an emotional reaction [beyond that]. It’s nice they say that’s Mitchell Drive, but I want them to have an emotional reaction. I don’t care what it is.”
She said at one of her exhibitions a viewer left because the experience of the works was one of powerful melancholy, and it depressed her. That was okay with LaPalombara.
She was also very okay with this reporter’s feeling that her cityscapes have a generally threatening quality about them, as if an evacuation had taken place. A silence resulting from a kind of mass absenteeism.
Gabriel DaSilva with the artist.
“In the best of all possible worlds, it’s ‘It’s beautiful.’ Unlike a lot of artists today, I’m interested in that aesthetic,” she said.
She added that there isn’t a specific New Haven aesthetic. She doesn’t have such conversations about sites and views and local takes with other painters about New Haven scenes, or of a “New Haven School” of painting along the lines of the“schools” that developed among abstract expressionists in New York City after World War Two. “Those artists talked to each other,” she said.
She, of course, talks to her colleagues. La Palombara has painted outdoors with Meddick, and others too. But no “school” or New Haven aesthetic exists, she said. Just many local artists doing many different things.
Gabriel DaSilva agreed, and she thanked him for the gray of the walls that brings out the yellows and oranges of her work.
“There’s nothing more exciting than sunlight on a wall,” she said.
Place runs at the DaSilva Gallery through April 30.