On Joe Concra’s rooftop in Uptown Kingston, the October sun is turning wood and brick gold. Beyond the neighboring roofs, the Rondout Valley spills in orange and yellow trees toward the Catskills. We are talking about penguins, but inevitably we get around to light. For a painter who has spent decades inventing worlds, Concra remains susceptible to the one in front of him.
“We have a certain green at sunset,” he says. “It’s a greenish blue that is unmistakably Hudson Valley.” He starts explaining how to mix it: cobalt blue, white, a little something else. Then he describes September’s light turning silver, and the changing light in the months that follow. “October, November, wow, it really is, it’s the moment for me.”
Concra first appeared on Chronogram’s cover in 1999, when balloons occupied his imagination. Twenty-seven years later, the balloons have delivered passengers. Among the paintings in “Polar,” his exhibition at Time & Space Limited in Hudson, is a basket traveling through mountains, a pointed hat peeking above its rim. The penguins have arrived.
The route was circuitous. Concra had been painting a spaceman—“the guy trying to get to space”—who somehow became trapped in ice. The picture needed something. What lives around ice? He painted a penguin, then added the tall, three-pompom hat that had already spent years migrating through his work. Something clicked.
“They’re kind of ridiculous and funny,” he says, “and also, who knows what they’re thinking?”
The hat carries its own history. Concra’s affection for the Punchinello figures of the 18th-century Italian artists Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (father and son), with their appetites, misadventures, and mockery of the powerful, predates the penguins. He first put one on an elephant. Its effect has endured. The three-pompom hat carries a trace of the court jester’s license to mock power. “It softens the blow,” Concra says. Its absurdity invites viewers into paintings whose implications can be darker than their comic protagonists initially suggest.
In The Crossing, this month’s cover painting, a boatload of these unlikely adventurers reprises the heroic arrangement of Washington crossing the Delaware. Elsewhere, they gather, travel, and inhabit an icy world whose rules remain under development. You can read a political message or a parable about climate change into them. You can also just enjoy a flightless bird in a stupid hat. Concra resists prescribing the experience. “For me it’s about making something beautiful and allowing the viewer to enter that world,” he says.
The penguins have also ventured beyond canvas. Concra has painted them onto dollar bills and inserted them into a book of sporting prints, replacing guns with birds. When he became stumped about his next move, he began making small paintings for friends and attaching them to utility poles near their homes. Between 75 and 100 have gone out into the world. Most have disappeared.
Giving them away restored something. “I can give stuff away and I can make people smile,” he says. The pleasure of that exchange helped propel his work back into public view. “Polar” is his first solo exhibition since a 2008 show at Donzella in Manhattan.
At 61, Concra is reclaiming attention for a practice that never stopped. Over the past 16 years, Concra, a cofounder of the O+ Festival, has poured energy into building the nonprofit that he might otherwise have spent promoting his paintings. But he never stopped painting. Now, with a substantial exhibition ahead, he is enjoying being introduced as a painter rather than the O+ guy.
The daily work supplies its own momentum. An idea suggests another; a problem opens a passage. Inspiration might arrive or it might not, but he’ll be in his studio after his morning espresso. “There’s no period to the sentence of painting,” Concra says.
Which presents a particular problem when the sentence keeps producing penguins. Even elephants, an old reliable subject, have failed to lure him away. “You keep knocking on the door and every time the door opens, it’s another penguin.”
Back on the roof, the light is changing. Concra talks about Titian’s Assumption of Mary, a painting in Venice he has traveled to see three times, and the red that brings him to tears. Across centuries, painters communicate through color, light, paint. Concra is still listening, still working out his reply. “Everything in my life has changed,” he says, referencing the last time he was on the cover of Chronogram, “but painting is still there.”
“Polar,” paintings by Joe Concra, is on view November 14-December 13 at Time & Space Limited, 434 Columbia Street, Hudson.
