It’s a misty day and there aren’t a lot of details to go on — no buildings or inland rock formations as landmarks. But because of painter Constance LaPalombara’s eye for including the right and necessary details, the scene is recognizable if you’ve ever been along the shore in, say, Morris Cove, and looked northward into the mouth of New Haven Harbor. With the defined sense of place comes a deeper appreciation for what LaPalombara is doing. She’s not capturing every detail, but she gets the details that matter. She grounds the viewer in a specific spot and then doesn’t just paint what the viewer might see through a camera lens. You could say she paints the atmosphere itself, the feeling of the air; if you concentrate enough, you can almost feel it.
New Haven 1 (Harbor) is part of “Constance LaPalombara: A Sense of Place,” a retrospective of the New Haven-based painter’s work running now at the Hilles Gallery at Creative Arts Workshop through Jan. 12. LaPalombara, who died in 2023 at the age of 87, reinvented herself a couple times over; “after careers in intelligence and academia, she embraced her passion for painting, earning her MFA,” an accompanying note reads. Her paintings “captured the spirit of the environments she cherished, from the bustling urbanity of New Haven to the serene coastal landscapes of Maine and the timeless countryside of Italy. Working primarily in oils, her paintings celebrated the interplay of light and color, creating evocative depictions of place that transcended mere representation.… This exhibition highlights LaPalombara’s unique ability to convey a sense of time and space through her meticulous observation and masterful use of color.”
It’s easy to understand why LaPalombara is getting a retrospective. In a couple dozen canvases in the gallery — arranged under the headings “New Haven,” “Still Life,” “Maine,” “Italy,” and “Southwest” — the viewer can see first of all how LaPalombara found her viewpoint and stuck with it, and how that singular approach led to a real diversity of moods and colors as LaPalombara moved through the world. There is diversity even within the categories. In her New Haven paintings, it’s obvious where every location is, and from what vantage point they’re being seen. A particularly poignant canvas marks the awning of the old Acme Building on Crown Street, which is now being remodeled into something else.
Perhaps more remarkable, however, is LaPalombara’s ability to capture different qualities of light in different locations. Her Maine canvases are a little sharper and lighter than her New Haven ones, an apt document of how Maine’s climate differs from here. But the differences become more apparent with geographic distance. Her canvases from Italy have a golden sheen to them, in comparison with the New Haven canvases, that feels less like an application of some gauzy romantic lens and more like a clear-eyed look at the way the quality of light is really different there.
The light changes again when LaPalombara visits the Southwest, and its arid, dusty heat. The approach is the same, but in many ways the Southwest and New Haven canvases couldn’t be more different — gray clouds replaced by orange sky, humidity by dryness, soil by sand. But it’s not just the landscape or its composition; it’s the air itself, rendering the world in a fundamentally different way to LaPalombara’s eye. Her attention to atmosphere reminds the viewer why it can be rejuvenating to leave the place you’re familiar with and come back again. A different place can teach the eye to see differently; and when we return, we see our everyday with a fresh perspective, right down to the air we breathe.
“Constance LaPalombara: A Sense of Place” runs at Creative Arts Workshop, 80 Audubon St., through Jan. 12. Visit CAW’s website for hours and more information.
