Glittering snow. The swoosh of skis; the scrape of skates. The hardcore coziness of Bernie mittens. We Vermonters cling to our wintry character as though to a toboggan flying down an icy hill. And yet as the climate warms, perhaps (with apologies to Noah Kahan) we should start to identify with a less flashy time of year: stick season.
Wolcott artist Gabriel Tempesta presents works portraying wild and rural scenes from throughout the year in “At the Edge of the Road … and Into the Woods,” on view through November 29 at Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro. Even though the scent of apple blossoms is practically palpable in “Spring Queen,” and the artist pays careful attention to the hues of late-summer greenery in “Almost Full,” Tempesta’s paintings and drawings are rooted in this season’s decomposing leaves and heavy skies. He acknowledges as much in a statement introducing the show. In November, he writes, “Survival begins to seem more immediate.”
Tempesta’s paintings and drawings are rooted in this season’sdecomposing leaves and heavy skies.
The theme of survival — particularly in marginal places, such as the edge of the road — ties together the different styles and bodies of work in the show. All of the works are paintings and drawings made since Tempesta, 46, shifted his practice from commercial illustration to fine art 16 years ago. His work reflects firsthand knowledge of the woods, where the artist hunts deer and camps with friends. He’s also a Christmas tree farmer: This will be his 15th year selling truckloads of organic evergreens at an outdoor lot in Brooklyn, starting later this month.
Working in watercolors, oils, milk-based casein paint and charcoal, Tempesta creates exquisitely photorealistic scenes, both in color and black and white. “Ermine on the Run,” for instance, presents the dramatic scene of a little white creature carrying its prey in its mouth, bounding off a rock and startling a chickadee in flight. Looking closely through spindly twigs, the viewer can see individual hairs in the ermine’s coat; other areas of the painting are softly blurry, mimicking a camera’s shallow depth-of-field effect. The image might be plucked from a wildlife magazine.
“Fell Swoop” is a similar scene, this one in color, of an owl closing in on a rabbit hightailing it across a snowy forest floor. Their drama plays out in front of a hyperrealistic moss-covered tree and behind stray branches so close to the “camera” that they’re blurry, giving the impression of a video still.
Other paintings with less action are no less photographic. “Relic” presents a lusciously gnarly, knotted tree, still standing despite the shelves of fungus protruding from its trunk. Tempesta’s mastery of texture in this grayscale work gives us everything we need to know about its brittle bark, rounded burls, scars and hollows.
The show includes works from Tempesta’s series on bumblebees and other threatened insects. Of these, one can’t help but stand out: the charcoal-and-watercolor “Monarch,” which enlarges the bug to the size of a real-life standing grizzly bear. Assembled from five panels, the drawing zooms way in on the butterfly, close enough to see the color variations in its furry thorax and the scales on its wings overlapping like worn cedar shingles. The wing doesn’t appear flat but dimensional, its peaks apparent thanks to subtle shading. Softer focus areas at its delicate edges give way to a grainy, blotchy background that looks like the surface of a rock but could equally be abstract — Tempesta gives up a little exactitude here in favor of letting his medium breathe.
He has followed that impulse to great effect in his newest series of drawings, which he started in September. All of them portray the ruins of abandoned barns and houses. Rather than the tightly controlled hand he deploys in earlier works that makes us question whether we’re looking at a photograph, here Tempesta experiments with a looser style. These works fully embrace their identity as drawings.
“Old House on Battle Row” doesn’t scrimp on detail — individual boards protrude from the crumbling façade, and a glint of light reflected in the upper windows suggests the end of the day. But we also see gesture, accident and action that reveal the artist’s hand. Grainy, smudgy clouds are blasts of charcoal dust; the weedy landscape dissolves into a loose gray wash. Wobbly power lines, attached to a precariously leaning pole, are just lines, after all.
Tempesta shows his thinking in the series by leaving in place sketch lines that establish the composition. In “Old Barn on Severance Hill 2,” for instance, he loosely maps out the curves and angles of the collapsing structures with quick, expressive marks before filling in the details of sagging boards and piles of lumber. Rather than depicting an entire landscape, he quickly conveys what parts of the scene he finds dynamic and compelling.
“Old House in Lowell” takes lessons from many of the other works on display. It incorporates the shadowy darks and bright highlights that define the space three-dimensionally, solidifying the house on the page. But it also revels in sooty, smeared clouds of charcoal and direct vertical slashes that recall stalks of dried grass too close to a camera lens and, as in Tempesta’s oil paintings, place the viewer practically in the scene.
The monochromatic palette and gestural style of these works is well suited to their subject. Neglect and admiration, nostalgia and curiosity, wildness and domesticity mesh in these views. Some scenes are overgrown and weedy, and the white space in others suggests a snowy field, but all of them can be located in stick season at its stickiest. They speak to the things that will persist, despite the winter — that, even tired and sidelined, survive. There’s a beauty in them which, as Kahan would say, will have to do. ➆
“At the Edge of the Road … and Into the Woods,” on view through November 29 at Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro.
The original print version of this article was headlined “In the Sticks | Gabriel Tempesta celebrates November at Highland Center for the Arts in Greensboro”
This article appears in Winter Preview • 2026.
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