Born in St. Paul in 1954, Joseph Byrne attended St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota and the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he earned his MFA in painting. Byrne has lived in Northfield, Minnesota where he taught at Carleton College for 13 years. He has received numerous fellowships and residencies, including an artist-in-residence fellowship to the American Academy in Rome and two MacDowell Colony Fellowships. From 1983 to 1994, Byrne was a member of the First Street Gallery in New York where he had three solo exhibitions. Since 1999 Byrne has been living in West Hartford, Connecticut, with poet Clare Rossini and their son, Francis. He has a studio nearby in Hartford where he teaches in the studio arts program at Trinity College. Artist Statement: This series of abstract paintings is based on the landscape of Connemara, in Western Ireland. My fascination with Connemara is both personal—this region is where my maternal grandmother was born and emigrated from at age nineteen—and conceptual. The geological history is fascinating, and the austere qualities of this rocky, boggy landscape presents visual problems that challenge and inspire me as a painter.The paintings are constructed in layers, a process that is additive and reductive. I put the paint on, take it off, and wipe more away; there’s a lot of erasure. This process imitates the way in which a landscape is altered by erosion and by layers that build up over time.In the end, I am less interested in creating a specific, fixed image of Connemara than one that is more suggestive of all aspects of this place, the often-harsh histories that have played out there, the passage of time and embedded memories. It is this I hope to reveal: the landscape that is seen and that which is unseen or implied, suggesting the essence of place itself.