Photograph by Sebastian Widmann
Daryl Joseph is the featured artist at Gallery Saratoga where the four seasons are the theme.
Gallery features the changing seasons
Artist has a fondness for watercolors
By Shari Kaplan
Outside the doors of Gallery Saratoga, the sun is shining, the mercury is climbing, and children's laughter echoes from nearby Wildwood Park--sure signs of summer.
Inside the gallery, however, visitors who know where to look can find burnished leaves blowing in an autumn breeze, the quiet beauty of snowfall in the mountains, and the first buds of spring blossoming on a crisp morning.
These seeming incongruities co-exist in Seasons, an exhibition by Daryl Joseph, this month's featured artist at Gallery Saratoga. The four seasons--plus those times of the year when seasons overlap--come to life on the gallery's walls through Joseph's images of seascapes, forests, mountains, fields and homes.
The Campbell resident himself is also an interesting blend of dichotomies: a retired Air Force colonel, astronautical engineer and a space shuttle flight director. Joseph now is a program manager with Lockheed Martin Western Development Lab, specializing in Air Force communication systems. Despite what he calls these analytical "left-brain" activities, he says he is just as strongly influenced by his creative right brain, since his childhood in Buffalo, N.Y.
"On the bus on the way to school, I'd draw ponies or houses or things that I saw along the way. I enjoyed it," he recalls, "but then I sort of suppressed it for a while."
His life busy with high-tech endeavors, Joseph didn't pursue art seriously until around 1990. He took art courses at West Valley College, studied with watercolorist and pastellist Marta Szoboszlay and also taught himself a few things. He also joined the Society of Western Artists and Gallery Saratoga, a member co-op gallery.
Most of the locales depicted in his Seasons exhibition are based on places he has been to, although a few are creations based on photographs, or simply taken from his mind's eye. Except for two pastels, all are watercolors painted on cold press paper, which he prefers over other papers for its texture.
"Watercolors tend to blend and run, and that's what you want, because it makes magical things happen," he says of his favorite medium.
Seasons runs through June 30. Gallery Saratoga is at 14531 Big Basin Way, Unit 3. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call 408.867.0458, or visit www.geocities.com/~artsite/saratoga/ on the Internet.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
