Bart Elsbach

Overheard in Town


"Bart Elsbach's delicate brush strokes and sublime use of color are quickly establishing him as one of America's premiere landscape artists."

-- Forbes Magazine


"His landscape paintings - with a meditative, luminous quality that shines through delicate brushwork - are gaining in popularity....They're paintings you want to live with."

-- Berkshire Week Magazine

from Forbes Magazine
Spring 1999 Issue
from Berkshire Week
October 3, 1996


"At 35, painter Bart Elsbach can't yet be called an 'old Dutch master,' but he may someday be thought of as a new Berkshire one. His landscape paintings - with a meditative, luminous quality that shines through delicate brushwork - are gaining in popularity...."

"....Through his wife, who had been the director of Interlaken School of Art, he met Ute Stebich, who...first showed Elsbach's paintings in 1995. 'I had seen his work, and I fell in love immediately,' Stebich said. 'It's really a celebration of the Berkshires, all those wonderful little places. They're paintings you want to live with.' Elsbach's 'classical quality' reminds her of 17th- and 18th-century European paintings, Stebich said, 'and they give me something that my soul needs.'"

"She has sold more than 65 Elsbachs..."

"Elsbach's use of color is subdued, often with only one bright one showing....Colors in paintings can reflect 'the overwhelming complexity of everything around us,' Elsbach said. 'Most things in nature are not one color; they're many colors.' He demonstrated by pointing to the knee of his blue cotton trousers, with shades of lighter or darker blue where the fabric had worn or where it was wrinkled." "'Paintings,' he said, 'unlike the world around us, don't have a light source, so the way to create a sense of light in a painting is through darks...'"

"'Whatever else we are,' the painter added, 'we are creatures of contrast.'"





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