Artist John Salminen speaks with Margaret VanDyken about his painting “Grant Lanterns,” which she purchased.
PHOTO BY AMY BECK
Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” And what sharpens the senses, amplifies your capacity for wonder, and makes the ol’ ocular system feel new again like traveling?
Painter John Salminen, who visited Reno last week for his exhibit at Stremmel Gallery, makes what are technically travel pictures. But you won’t see a Golden Gate Bridge or a Statue of Liberty in his New York and San Francisco street scenes.
“We live in northern Minnesota, 40 acres of woods, so when I go to New York everything I see is exotic,” he says. “I have artist friends in New York City who’ve seen these scenes, and they tell me they would never think to photograph them.”
Instead, he finds the magic in the mundane. Salminen once noticed a dozen shades of liquid-eye-candy brown on a rusted security gate at a Manhattan dry cleaner’s shop. He mapped them out attentively as if they were one of those famous landmarks he “studiously avoids.” In a dreamy picture of San Francisco at rush hour, the frame is completely filled with buildings and steep streets crowded with late-model vehicles, with not even a peek at the sky. Somehow, it feels like a breath of fresh air. To read more by Kris Vagner, Reno News & Review, Arts&Culture, click here.
