Artist Biography

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Chris Volpe began his creative and professional life as a writer and teacher. While teaching the history of art at Franklin Pierce University and Chester College of New England, both in New Hampshire, he began researching and writing about 19th century American landscape artists who painted in the White Mountains. Not long after, he began experimenting with oil paints, creating emotive, semi-abstract landscapes of his own.

With his wife, artist Anna Birch, Volpe shares studio space in the Mills at Salmon Falls in Rollinsford, N.H. His work has been exhibited and sold through juried shows at the Lamprey Arts & Culture Alliance (LACA), Beaver Brook Farm in Hollis, N.H., and at auctions at Spring Hill Farm, Vermont, Exeter Wet Paint, and the annual "Art To Go" show and auction organized by Seacoast Outright.

Volpe's recent work consists of expressive landscapes that reference 19th century traditions such as Barbizon and Tonalism but filter them through a 20th/21st century sensibility.

Some of the landscapes are drawn from memory, some are created en plein air, and others arise from imaginative literature. The paintings express abstracted, dream-like moods and visions, often of nature's transitional states: dusk, dawn, sun-showers, clouds, marshes, moonlight, dark trees silhouetted against luminous skies.