Joseph Paquet, while pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York, had the good fortune of finding a mentor in artist John Foote who opened his eyes to the joys of drawing the human figure. After graduating, Paquet met another major influence in his life, John Osborne, who was uniquely gifted artist and teacher. Osborne believed that a landscape painting should begin on location, but that its poetic essence should be completed in the solitude of the artist’s studio. Paquet experienced a demanding and rewarding apprenticeship, in which he learned to fuse field studies with the image he could see in his mind’s eye. Increasingly however, Paquet is creating most of his work from life, believing that the direct correspondence with nature increases the potential for greater feeling. “Intellect, he says, doesn’t keep one warm at night.”
