Bio
Tess Barbato is a young, 21st century American realist oil painter whose work is conceptually driven. She possesses a larger than life vision that results in incredibly detailed portrayals of the most mundane of objects.
Tess inherited her artistic sensibility from a long line of family artists. She graduated Summa Cum Laude in Fine Arts from Plymouth State University. Her lifelong struggle with dyslexia compelled her to use art as her preferred means of communication. And for Tess, communication has always been paramount. She is an artist with something to say, a master of delivery in the form of wry paradox.
Tess' paintings have been accepted for numerous juried exhibitions and have accumulated several awards and honors. Some of her recent showings have been in the Art of the Figure, juried by Philip Pearlstein in Setauket, New York; Less Is More: Small Works in a Great Space, juried by Jack Rasmuissen and Joann Moser in Annapolis; The New England Collective IV juried by Kaveh Mojtabai and Brian Goslow, the Publisher and the Editor-in-Cheif of ArtScope Magazine at Galatea Fine Art in Boston. She was also a Finalist in the Artist Magazine 30th Annual Art Competition and she received an Honorable Mention for the 2013 International Art Festival at 25CPW Gallery, NYC.
She is currently working out of her studio in Framingham, Massachusetts. Please contact me if you would like to take a tour of the studio.
Statement
I use art to communicate about certain current social topics which have caught my attention. The medium of oils allows me to create dimensionality and add suppleness that depicts an almost palpable rendering of the subject. This medium allows me to depict ordinary, often overlooked items in a distinctly tactile way.The common thread in all of my pieces is that they engender a conversation with the viewer about relationships. The work evokes the obvious, if sometime unconscious, relationships that we have with objects we encounter every day. Aesthetically there is the purely visual relationship of the objects in a space and to one another. My compositions transform those mundane objects into subjects which demand attention while engaging the viewer in the discourse that I wish to provoke. Ultimately, I would like to spark a dialogue between my work and the viewer, who hopefully will appreciate the stylistic and technical choices that I have made.