Valerie Shesko is a former gallery director, Associate Editor of The Artist’s Magazine, and Instructor of Fine Arts at Quinnipiac University.  She has exhibited her award-winning work in museums and galleries nationally and internationally including the J.B. Speed Museum, Louisville KY, Stadtische Galerie, Regensburg, Germany, and the Artists’ House, Jerusalem, Israel, among others.  Her work is featured in the book Art Journey: American Landscapes 89 Painters’ Perspectives by Kathryn Kipp and is in the permanent collection of the Cincinnati Art Museum and corporate and private collections throughout the U.S. and abroad. She received a B.A. in art history from SUNY at Binghamton University, an M.S. in art Education from Southern Connecticut State University and an M.F.A. in painting from the University of Cincinnati.  

Artist's Statement:

I grew up in urban New York City but was fortunate as a young adult to vacation in the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and the White and Smokey Mountains.  Thus began my life-long love of landscape.  Later travels to Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Norway and the American southwest have continued to inspire the light and forms in my work.  

I want the process of painting, combined with memory and imagination, to direct my work: random colors and shapes often suggest landscape motifs, the challenge then becomes making what has emerged more real.  

As far as influences, I quote two reviewers: critic Max Halperin (Chapel Hill, N.C.) observed that “Shesko’s…bright landscapes…some in oil, most in egg tempera, … all look as though painted jointly by the American Thomas Moran and the English Joseph Turner after passing through the era of abstract expressionism – with the new approaches but with their 19th century sensibilities intact.”  Curator Daniel Brown (Cincinnati, Ohio) noted another influence: “she combines the Chinese aesthetic of essence and simplicity, with the other-worldly light of American Hudson River School painters, and the vast sense of American space and geography.”

Artist Interview

1) What inspired me to become an artist?

I have a very clear memory of standing in front of an easel for the very first time in kindergarten. There were three jars of paint and a brush in each. As I picked up the brush I felt a wonderful, immediate connection to the paint and to the paper. I felt powerful, free and totally absorbed. Through all the ups and downs and dry spells that feeling has never gone away.

2) When did you start painting and how has your work change over time?

Growing up in NYC I could have gone to a specialty arts high school but I didn't want to miss out on getting a full academic education with advanced classes in science, math, history, etc. The summer before going away to college I took a history course at Brooklyn College and discovered my love for art history. At SUNY at Binghamton art history majors were required to take almost as many studio courses as in their major. My painting classes there and at the Brooklyn Museum art School in the summer were concentrated on painting from the model.

While studying for an MS in art education I concentrated on printmaking. I fell in love with etching and continued working in my own studio, exhibiting nationally and internationally. With etching I discovered my working method: finding my idea and image directly as I worked with the art materials. I starting experimenting with combining printmaking with more direct methods -painting on glass and making contact prints(cliché verre), silkscreening sumi ink onto raw canvas, cutting and collaging the marks in a landscape, direct painting with blue print chemicals on canvas and developing the image in sunlight, transforming magazine images with solvents and oil paint (Deconstructions).

Eventually, I realized I needed a break from my long-standing love affair with chemicals and solvents. Instead of choosing watercolor or acrylics, I decided to teach myself egg tempera (raw pigments tempered with diluted egg yolk and water). I remembered being impressed and intrigued with the luminescent glow of a Robert Vickery egg tempera panel while working in a New Haven art gallery before grad school. Since then I've alternated working in oil, egg tempera and acrylics. My etchings were small, monochromatic landscape gems; the paintings grew into bigger versions in full color with more attention to skies.

3) Can you discuss the Glacier series in more detail?

Although I grew up a city girl my parents loved to vacation at Jersey beaches. I was used to seeing farmland and woods and the shore, but nothing prepared me for the White Mountains of New Hampshire when I was 10. Like the easel in kindergarten, this was a major shock to my system I was awed and totally smitten. Much of my work has been inspired from trips to mountainous places out west and abroad. Last summer I traveled to the Canadian Rockies and Glacier National Park. Although I sketched while I was there, when I returned home I was drawn to working with collage materials I had acquired and worked with over the years - experiments on paper and mylar sheets, paintings and prints I had worked on but left unfinished. In trying to clean up and discard stuff in my studio I found myself pulling pieces together into collages that paid homage to what I had just seen.