Edward Ruggieri

Artist Statement

The landscape paintings submitted for consideration NBAS Oils, Sculpture, and Mixed Media Exhibition show the love I have for landscape painting. Oil paint allows me the opportunity to blend colors, to achieve tonal ranges, subtle shifts in value, and a velvety texture that suits my aesthetic goal. Painting in oil, I have the added ability to easily return to a work of art to rework a piece when a new memory arises, as my landscapes are amalgamations of memories of a variety of hiking trips, fishing trips, and road trips in recent memory and feelings of those beloved family outings from childhood.

Memories change as time progresses. The fact of recalling an instance in time, talking about it, reflecting on it, conversing with others about it has been proven to alter the memory itself. What is left is a vague recollection of the encounter, often a combination of several spaces. My landscapes serve as the current representation of those memories. Traveling to a myriad of locations, I experience the setting, and I do not paint immediately, but let time pass so as to filter out the extraneous details that are not pertinent to the overall feel of the scene depicted. Enough details are presented in the scenes to give a sense of place, but there is still a wondering, a wanting for more specifics. This (I believe) is part of the allure. My goal is not to create a recognizable place, where one can proclaim, “I’ve been there, that’s by the Delaware Water Gap!” but rather, to create a feeling of the scene depicted, the emotion involved with being in that space. Without photographic references and using my mind to guide me, it proves to be challenging to create a work that I think is successful. However, I am very proud of each of these works included for consideration.