Catalina Island News

Catalina: The Wild Side Artist of the Week: Joe Paquet

2013-05-01
Catalina Island Conservancy

This is Joe Paquet’s third time around as a featured artist at Catalina: The Wild Side Art Show and Sale, scheduled for June 21-22, 2013, at the Catalina Island Country Club.

While pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Paquet had the good fortune to find a mentor. John Foote opened Paquet’s eyes to the joys of drawing the human figure. After graduating, Joe met another major influence in his life, John Osborne, who was uniquely gifted in producing convincing landscape paintings from memory. Osborne believed a landscape painting should begin on location, but that its poetic essence should be completed in the solitude of the artist’s studio.

Paquet experienced a demanding and rewarding apprenticeship, in which he learned to fuse field studies with the image he could see in his mind’s eye. “The intellectual process became married to the intuitive,” he explains. “Paint what you know as well as what you see. 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.”

Paquet teaches and paints at Hurinenko and Paquet Studio in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is a signature member of the Plein Air Painters of America, the Salmagundi Club and an out-of-state artist member of the California Art Club.

Catalina: The Wild Side Art Show and Sale
Eleven nationally acclaimed plein air artists will display their interpretations of Catalina's rugged wildlands as well as Avalon and Two Harbors at the Catalina: The Wild Side Art Show and Sale on June 21-22. The art-filled weekend will begin with a special Artists Preview Dinner on June 21, the Friday evening before the show, at a private residence in Avalon, Catalina Island. The afternoon of Saturday, June 22, the show – featuring more than 100 plein air paintings – will take place at the Catalina Island Country Club, followed by an optional prix fixe dinner. Tickets for the show and the dinners are available online.