Rita Baragona
Rita Baragona paints her natural subjects as they change: giving her attention to flowers as they unfold so slowly that time expands, and to water as it moves, like her breath, in ceaseless cadences. Many works are painted as moment-to-moment conversations with nature. While others combine her observations with accrued memories. In her sketchbook pages she explores ideas that guide her perception. Her paintings are infused with luminous color and rhythmic notations, expressing the transient energy that informs matter’s shape. In them, light sensations translate into mass and color, glimpses in time into form and space. There is a sensual joy in seeing aesthetic harmony within impermanence. At the heart of her paintings, Baragona strives to express a visual poetry found within nature’s deep design.
Baragona lives and paints just across the Delaware in rural Columbia, NJ with her husband St. Clair Sullivan. She was born in NYC in 1945 and brought up in NJ, received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1967, and attended the NY Studio School from 1968 to 1970. She taught painting and drawing at Blair Academy in Blairstown, NJ until 2013.
Rita Baragona has exhibited her paintings in one-person and group shows throughout the USA. She has had multiple one-person shows at the Bowery Gallery, NYC, most recently in 2022. Selected shows include at Dutot Museum, PA; Washington Art Association, CT; Well Street Gallery, AK; Fairleigh Dickinson University, NJ; and Rider University, NJ; Westbeth, NYC; with Zeuxis, at Lancaster Museum, PA; the Mississippi Museum, MS.
Baragona has been positively reviewed in a variety of publications of the years:
What a nature painter must do is to impose some human logic or private poetry on the natural world. By this measure Baragona is a very interesting painter. Jed Perl in Art in America
The fact that matter is energy creates a whole new set of in-form-ation. All nature is in flux, but beneath the flux is timelessness…for energy is constantly being expressed in form. Baragona makes tangible patterns of energy. Lawrence Murphy in Ellipses
