Josette Urso makes paintings, watercolors and drawings in an urgent attempt to capture the essence and energy of whatever surrounds her – be it a landscape, a subway, an apartment view, or a dinner table. Her approach involves moment-to-moment extrapolation governed by intuitive leaps of scale, color and wayward geometry. She works from observation--intuitively, playfully--in a process that makes room for many visual surprises and an enormous range of inventive mark making.
She says, “In painting, I'm responding to shape and form and the light and the experience of space. I'm looking off in every direction simultaneously, so the pieces are getting a bit more abstract, but they're still all based on looking. I find that my visual vocabulary is much broader if I respond to something as a jumping off point rather than relying on what's in my head.
I'm always trying to hunt for some kind of surprise. I don't want to ever know. I thrive on the ‘not knowing.’ It's like this journey, stumbling upon situations you didn't know existed until you discover them through your work. I never know how the painting's going to look until it happens; I just kind of figure it out along the way.”
Josette Urso has exhibited widely throughout the United States and around the world, including at the Bronx Museum of Art, the Painting Center, the Tampa Museum of Art, the Museo de las Americas in Puerto Rico, and the New York Public Library. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, awards, and fellowships including from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Ballinglen Arts Foundation in Ireland, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, the Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation, Basil H. Alkazzi, Loft Nota Bene in Spain, Camargo in France, Ucross in Wyoming and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY. She has an MFA in painting from the University of South Florida, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
