Swimming Holes & Gathering Places - Vermont and Beyond

Opening Saturday, August 10 | 5-7PM

“Having painted all over the world for more than fifty years, it’s Vermont that is home for me and my work. It’s the villages that we live in or create, 

it’s the family that we are born toand the family that we acquire. These paintings celebrate the landscapes where I find community.”  

– Henry Isaacs

Henry Isaacs paints more than the landscape. With his iconic brush stroke and use of color—both as playful as they are bold—he captures a place in that landscape, and the community that gathers there. Isaacs takes you with him to the much loved—and sometimes secret—ponds, lakes, and rivers of Vermont, to Maine’s beaches and coves, or the parks of New York. Henry Isaacs paints where he is. Perhaps you have been there too.

Isaacs starts his paintings on site, from a backpack of supplies he carries almost everywhere. He brings them back to his studio—up a dirt road, near a pond, in Sharon—to finish them. His color is vivid, his forms simplified, his perspective and pictorial space flattened. Isaacs’ thick, short strokes of bright color capture the impression—the fleeting moment —of the scene before him. In this he evokes the French Impressionists. He captures the light sparkling on the water, the brooding weather or the perfect blue sky. He uses no black—grays and dark colors are created by mixing contrasting colors—like the Impressionists. Or perhaps Isaacs is a Fauvist—he does not simply paint the landscape but rather reacts to it, with an explosion of unblended, brilliant color. Frankly, there is no definition needed. When you stand before a Henry Isaacs painting—whether it is of Vermont, Maine, or even Nepal—you know that he loved it there. And he invites you to love it there too.

Maureen O’Connor Burgess, Curator

Henry Isaacs boasts a great education. He is an alum of the Slade School of Art in London, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Putney School in Vermont.  Isaacs’ teaching career is also impressive—he taught anatomical 
drawing at Dartmouth Medical School; drawing, painting and printmaking at Massachusetts College of Art; and printmaking and drawing at several European colleges. He was also highly sought after for his classes at Islesford 
Painting Workshops in Maine. A winner of many awards, in 1998 he won the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award. Isaacs is represented by the Gleason Fine Art in Boothbay Harbor, Maine; and the Warm Springs Gallery in Virginia. 
His work is included in many private and public collections. Henry Isaacs resides in Sharon, Vermont.