Born in St. Paul, Joseph Byrne attended St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota and the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he earned his MFA in painting. He is a past member of First Street Gallery in New York where he had three solo exhibitions. He is currently a member of Zeuxis, an independent association of still life painters from across the country. Byrne has received numerous fellowships and residencies, including an artist-in-residence fellowship to the American Academy in Rome and two MacDowell Colony Fellowships. Byrne lived in Northfield, Minnesota where he taught at Carleton College for 13 years. He now resides in West Hartford, Connecticut, with poet Clare Rossini and their son Francis, where he teaches in the studio arts program at Trinity College.
"My paintings are, to some extent, fictional constructs that represent a long and delicate negotiation between what is out there in the world—the objects in a still life; the rocks, hills, or bodies of water in a landscape—and my own personal response to them. This most recent body of work is based on the landscape of the huge Roundstone Bog in the Connemara region of west Ireland. My fascination with this area is both personal—this region is where my maternal grandmother was from—and conceptual. The geological history of the bog is fascinating, and the contemporary characteristics of this austere landscape present visual problems that intrigue and challenge me as a painter. As in all of my work, it is the relationship between perception, representation, and abstraction that fascinates me. For example, how a field of rocks becomes an arrangement of color, physical marks of paint on canvas or paper, and how the painting that results can resonate with the viewer’s own thoughts and experiences." |
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