Valeri Larko

The landscape I am most compelled to paint is the urban fringe with its jumble of rusting industrial sites, aging infrastructure and funky waterways that can be found on the outskirts of our cities. It is here among the ruins of our contemporary culture that I uncover stories about the everyday world around us, stories that reflect how we have changed and continue to change the environment.

All of my paintings are done on location. I spend hours roaming around an area until I find something that resonates with me. Once I do, I set up my easel and return to a site many times. A large painting can take up to three months to complete. The process of painting on location over a long period of time is crucial to my working method because it allows me to form a deeper connection to a particular place through careful observation and personal interaction with the people I meet there. While talking to people in the area, I learn a lot about the sites that I am painting. I find that this interaction, both with people and the environment, makes the method by which I work as important as the final painting.

Although my paintings are very detailed, I am less concerned with reproducing an exact documentation of a scene and more interested...

EDUCATION:Du Cret School of The Arts, Plainfield, New Jersey. Arts Students League, New York, New York. National Academy of Design, New York, New York

Valeri Larko’s paintings have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the US and Europe. Solo exhibits include Bronx Museum of Art, NY, Hampden Gallery, UMass, Amherst, Lyons Wier Gallery, NYC, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, The Morris Museum, Morristown, NJ, The Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, NJ, The New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, Safe-T-Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Bronx River Art Center, NY, The College of New Rochelle, NY and the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit.

Notable group exhibits include The Bronx Museum, NY, Lehman College, Bronx, NY, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH, J. Cacciola Gallery, NYC, Barbara Frigerio Gallery, Milan, Italy, Stockton College Art Gallery, Galloway, NJ, The Katonah Museum of Art, NY, The Jersey City Museum, ACA Galleries, NYC, The National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC, Aljira, a center for contemporary Art, Newark NJ, Bruton Street Gallery in London, England and the American Embassy in Minsk, Belarus.