Joseph Paquet

B. 1962, Patterson, NJ; currently resides in Saint Paul MN

Joseph Paquet received his B.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. From an early age, Paquet was immersed in art, greatly due to his father, who loved to paint and sculpt. He also credits artists, John Foote and John Osborne as being two significant influences during his formative years as a young painter.

Paquet was introduced to John Foote while studying at the School of Visual Arts. Foote taught traditional figure drawing and quickly impressed upon Paquet the value of learning ones craft in order to best express personal vision. After graduation, still seeking further enrichment, Paquet apprenticed with landscape painter, John Osborne, who taught how to see objects in various degrees of sunlight and to push oneself to go beyond a mere transcription of nature. 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. It was under Osborne’s guidance that Paquet first learned to fuse field studies with the image he could see in his mind’s eye.

Paquet’s landscapes exhibit the confident brushwork of a skilled plein-air painter. He is able to create a believable space with a single stroke of paint. The world Paquet depicts may, or may not be, the world as it actually is, but rather his paintings represent an articulation of the vision of the artist. For me, he explains, “The intellectual process became married to the intuitive. – Paint what you know well as what you see.” He goes on to expand the possibilities, “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 currently lives, paints and teaches in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has been featured in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, The Artist Magazine, American Artist and Plein Air Magazine. He has been awarded both the Artists’ Choice and Collectors’ Choice from the Laguna Beach Plein Air Invitational. In 2008 he won the Alden Bryan Memorial Prize from the Salmagundi Club and placed 1st in Landscape at the Richeson 75: Artist’s Choice Competition.