Polar brings together a new series of paintings that navigate the emotional distances and magnetic forces between people, places, and memory—anchored by a recent body of work featuring penguins. These figures, both whimsical and resilient, become stand-ins for our own attempts to find balance and belonging in shifting environments.
Contrasts—light and shadow, stillness and motion, —serve as a language for exploring how we move toward and away from one another. The penguins, moving together and apart, echo this push and pull. This body of work was created during a period of deep reflection. Polar invites viewers into a space where opposites coexist, where tension becomes beauty, and where the act of looking reveals the quiet charge beneath the surface.
Joe Concra is a painter who is devoted to the traditional practice of form, color, and light as language. With paint he can capture tensions and elusive moments he understands as being connective and honest. He is dedicated to paint – every facet of the science and magic that is the making and mixing of paint, but especially color. The Hudson Valley light anchors Joe’s work and inspires the worlds he creates. First he convinces himself of their existence, but always with the hope that someone else might be moved to stay and look a little while, to get lost there and find their own story. Joe holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art where he was a student of Grace Hartigan’s. He is a long time Kingston resident and a founder of O+, an organization to which he has dedicated more than fifteen years of work on its mission of the exchange of art, medicine, and healthcare.
