Nature Observed: The Landscapes of Joseph Fiore Edited by David Dewey

Throughout most of Joseph Fiore's painting career, he was known as a landscape painter. However, to just label him a representational painter of nature does not complete the picture of his true creative motivations. The influence of eminent abstractionists Willem de Kooning, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Josef Albers during his years as a student from 1946 to 1948 at Black Mountain College set in motion the two modes of expressing the natural world that would determine the artistic path he would follow throughout his life as an artist: abstraction and representation. Essays by David Dewey, Mary Emma Harris, Roger F. Pasquier, Jessica May, Carl Little and Susan C. Larsen probe these two approaches of representing and interpreting nature in Nature Observed.