At seventy-five, with work held in private collections across North America, Europe, and Oceania, Montreal landscape visual artist Bob Venafro returns to Galerie ERGA with his sixth solo exhibition, About Time, continuing his evocative forest and seascapes. The vernissage is on Thursday, July 2 from 5pm-8pm, and the show runs from June 30 to July 5.
The title of this new exhibit, About Time, carries more than one meaning. Time is the subject of every landscape Venafro has painted - not chronology, but duration: the weight of a moment, the light that changes everything, the stillness that follows the rush. "About Time is all about change. It is about being flexible. Time is a commodity that lives in us; and we choose how we spend it," Venafro explains. After decades in thriving careers helping others, he arrived, deliberately, at a one-room studio in his Montreal condo.
A professional visual artist with a sustained international practice, Venafro picked up a palette knife for the first time at sixty. He spent twenty years in health and social services as a social worker, eventually rising to director, and followed that with financial services, where he worked with young clients to help them see their futures clearly. What both careers taught him was that people move when they feel something, not just when they understand it.
Venafro works almost exclusively with the palette knife technique, building up thick layers of paint rather than spreading it out. This mastery of impasto produces pieces that are sculpturesque, tactile, and alive. Surfaces project outward - closer to low-relief sculpture than conventional painting - and create a strong, immediate visual impact. In a gallery, people stop. They lean in. They want to touch.
His subject is landscape: forest and sea, the two environments that have drawn him since childhood, including inspiration from Montreal's Mount Royal. Growing up in a dense Montreal neighbourhood, it was travel with Carol, his wife of 52 years, that opened him up to open space - the rush of sea air, the stillness of deep forest. He paints what it feels like to stand inside them. "Though I am creating art, I am evoking an emotion. I paint what a landscape feels like, not only what it looks like. I am asking the viewer to come and do the same."
