Solebury Farm

"Solebury Farm"
8x10 oil on canvas on board

For this scene, I went to Carousel Lavender Farm in Bucks County, Pa to paint the lavender fields in bloom, but I ended up painting the view looking across the road at a different farm. You just never know what's going to inspire you until you get there.

Stony Brook Boulders

This painting was done at a place I discovered while exploring D&R Greenway properties for their upcoming plein air show. It's at the Northern Stony Brook Preserve, deep in the woods between Featherbed Lane and Mountain Church Road in East Amwell, NJ. I've walked the trails here before but never this section and WOW what a nice surprise it was when I reached this spot! It was such an incredibly peaceful place to spend a few hours painting (even though the mosquitoes were brutal). Stony Brook really lives up to it's name here.

"Stony Brook Boulders"
11x14 oil on panel

It's interesting how different my painting is from the photograph I took at the exact same spot. This illustrates one of the key ideas about painting on location: that it's not about copying what's in front of you, it's about capturing the artist's vision and feelings. When I look at my painting, it really is the place I remember being at. When I look at my photograph, I hardly recognize the place. It is the same place, I guess I just see it differently than my camera does:


People often tell me that my paintings are so good that they look like photographs. I know that's meant as the highest compliment but I hope people can appreciate that a good painting is much more than a photographic representation. Ideally it shows the artist's very personal way of looking at the world, and it gives you some sense of what inspired them enough to stop and paint.

Distant Pines

"Distant Pines"
8x10 oil on panel

This scene is on a D&R Greenway preserved farm near Lawrenceville, NJ. It's in a little valley very close to some major highways, but felt so isolated there that I may as well have been in Maine.

Palisades Highway Art Gallery

"Round Valley Dam Triptych"
16x60 acrylic on canvas
(3 * 16x20 canvases)

Palisades car insurance company will be exhibiting original works by area artists on some of the largest and most-viewed canvases in the state – New Jersey highway billboards! Artists are submitting work in an online contest where works will selected for the Highway Art Gallery. Visit their website and vote for your favorite submissions - I've submitted 10 paintings for consideration, which you can find by looking for my full name, Joe Kazimierczyk. Voters are also entered into a contest where you can win a 'New Jersey driving destination prize' (but just cancel out of that box if you don't want to enter your contact information your vote will still count).

The painting above is one of my entries. It's an older painting of the roadway atop one of the dams at Round Valley Reservoir near Lebanon, NJ. Looking out over the reservoir is beautiful, but I just love the patterns of drainage channels and access roads on the side of the dam.

On the contest website, all of my entries were cropped to a format required for the billboards. So what you'll see isn't the entire painting but I tried to pick some that worked well in that format.