Artist – Chris Cashiola

The European Impressionist and the Post Impressionist painters have the most influence upon my work.  Claude Monet said that “When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have in front of you, a tree, a field . . . . . Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own impression of the scene.”  I follow this advice when I paint.  I believe an artist should “always leave something for the imagination of the viewer.”    

I love to paint outdoors, “plein air” painting.  However, because of rapidly changing conditions outdoors, I will put as much as I can on a canvas and then finish it indoors.  I never focus on grand vistas or an idea of what will constitute a beautiful painting.  Simple subjects best reflect the world around us.  Some of the greatest paintings found in museums around the world are very ordinary scenes that an artist has captured and committed to canvas.

The beauty of painting is that you always develop and learn new things.  I heard it said of an old master painting in his seventies, after a lifetime of painting, that he believed that by the time he reached the age of eighty five he might know what he is doing.  Over the last ten years, I have been able to concentrate on my work in oil painting.  My love for nature fuels my passion for landscape painting.  Oil painting on canvas is how I am able to express my feelings for the beauty of the natural world around us.

I was born in Houston, Texas in 1949.  After completing law school, I became an officer in the U. S. Army.  My career in the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps allowed my family and I to live in many different places throughout the world.  After retiring from military service, I practiced law in Massachusetts as a criminal appellate attorney.  I retired from the practiced of law after thirty five years.