Recent Paintings by Josette Urso

Josette Urso makes paintings, watercolors and drawings in an urgent  attempt to capture the essence and energy of whatever surrounds her – be it a landscape, a subway, an apartment view, or a dinner table.  Her approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intuitive leaps of scale, color and wayward geometry She works from observation, intuitively, playfully, in a process that makes room for many visual surprises and an enormous range of inventive mark making.

She says, “In painting, I’m responding to shape and form and the light and the experience of space. I’m looking off in every direction simultaneously, so the pieces are getting a bit more abstract, but they’re still all based on looking. I find that my visual vocabulary is much broader if I respond to something as a jumping off point rather than relying on what’s in my head.

I’m always trying to hunt for some kind of surprise. I don’t want to ever know. I thrive on the ‘not knowing.’ It’s like this journey, stumbling upon situations you didn’t know existed until you discover them through your work. I never know how the painting’s going to look until it happens; I just kind of figure it out along the way.”