Though I am creating art, I am evoking an emotion.
This has guided fifteen years of practice. Bob's work prioritises the felt experience over representation, capturing atmospheric depth that moves between tranquillity, longing, and awe. You do not simply look at these paintings. You enter them.
Working with a knife, his self-taught mastery of Impasto produces surfaces that are sculpturesque, tactile, and alive. Expansive paintings and intimate miniatures share the same driving force, a sense of place that is as much interior as it is geographical. Landscapes and seascapes become the language. Emotion is what they say.
In his seventh decade, Venafro has arrived at Ipseity, absolute selfhood, hard-earned and uncompromising. Drawing from a life in finance before the knife became his primary language, he brings something rare to the canvas. The story he is painting is his emotion. And yours, to discover. I'm discontinuing my signature on the front of the work. www.venafrobob.com