Joanne Pagano Weber
Artist Joanne Pagano Weber sees the magnificence in you. She sees your uniqueness, your beauty, and she will fall in love with you. The truth of this was exhibited at Saugerties’ Jane St. Art Center when her piece, “Portraits of Saugerties” was exhibited in Spring 2023. Joanne created twenty-three near life size portraits of Saugerties residents, ranging from a Price Chopper employee to the owner of 9W Diner.
By Teresa Giordano
Pagano Weber says that she always wanted to dig into where she was living and make portraits of her neighbors. After being awarded a grant from Shout Outs’ Susana Meyer Creative Arts Award, she purchased supplies and hit Saugerties’ streets. She mustered her courage and approached strangers asking if she could take a cell phone snapshot for her project. Some declined, but thankfully not all. She used the small photos as models for the life-sized portraits, sketching each figure on cardboard in bold lines with soft charcoal then finessed the details with acrylic paint. Her priority was capturing the details of her subjects’ faces because, she says that’s where she finds “the essence of each being, something of their souls.” Her passion and emotion are evident when she says that every one of the faces she encounters is beautiful. For her, people’s faces reflect the “endless abundance of form that is creation.” Magnificence. Uniqueness. Beauty.
The artist’s first attempt to capture the essence of a person was after seeing a drawing of then President John F. Kennedy on the cover of a magazine when she was nine years old. Even as a child she could see that the drawing captured something of the President that no photograph could. She could see the ruggedness, masculinity, and handsomeness of the man. She got out her Number 2 pencil and tried to replicate what she saw and felt.
It seems that the young artist was inspired by more than Kennedy’s ruggedness and masculinity. Something of the President’s soul touched her as well, his sense of social justice. Joanne’s art often reflects her social values. Like many artists she feels things deeply, she’s touched by the zeitgeist. She’s concerned with the hardships and suffering in the world. She expresses this metaphorically with what she calls visual poetry; found images that express loss and grief or strength and resilience that she assembles and then transfers to canvas. Joanne’s commitment to art and to Saugerties can also be seen and heard in Dialogues for the Eye and Ear, a monthly multi-disciplinary arts series she curates with her husband, poet and art historian Bruce Weber. Together they choose a local writer, visual artist, and musician to perform and discuss their work with an audience.
Joanne lives and works in her studio in Barclay heights. We’re looking forward to seeing more of her work around town.
You can see more of Joanne Pagano Weber’s art at:
