George Gallo

Seeing to Paint

Before painter, script writer and movie director George Gallo could really paint in the tradition of the Pennsylvania Impressionists, he had to learn how see

By Bob Waite

At the age of 12 George Gallo’s mother gave him an oil painting set. As he experimented with his oil paints, he became enamored with landscape painting. “I don’t know why,” he admits. Then as a young man, George went to an art show in New York at the Grand Central Gallery, which at the time was owned by John Evans. This show not only firmed up his commitment to landscape painting, but he says, “…literally changed the direction of my life.”

The show featured Pennsylvania Impressionists Walter Elmer Schofield, Daniel Garber and Edward Willis Redfield. George, recalling the Bernardsville Creek

Autumn Splendor

show, says, “The impact that the show had on me was pretty overwhelming because I walked into this giant gallery on 57th Street and here are these large paintings that are like 57 by 60. Standing in front of a Redfield as a young guy trying to be a painter was an amazing experience. When you get close to one of his paintings it is just energized pieces of paint, but when you stand back—Wow! You just feel the warmth. I had to figure out how to do it.”

The Grand Central’s owner John Evans and George Gallo soon became close friends. Evans gave George a stack of 5 by 7 transparencies to study and George bought a lightboard and became familiar with them all. “There wasn’t a lot of literature on the Pennsylvania Impressionists back then,” he recalls.

To learn more about these Pennsylvania painters, George drove all the way to New Hope from upstate New York. “I went to New Hope, Phillips Mill and all the places that Pennsylvania Impressionists painted. And I fell in love with the area.”

George from then on visited Bucks County regularly. “I started these pilgrimages to paint. I would attempt to paint outside—these large paintings. All I did was paint. Over time I began to get a handle on it and I painted nonstop.”

Besides painting, George Gallo became a noted

Hollywood director and screenwriter and is known for such films as Midnight Run, Bad Boys and Middle

Men. He started working in the movie industry at the age of thirty and moved to California. Nonetheless he continued to make his pilgrimages to Bucks County to paint what he views as the most beautiful scenery in the country. He says, “I am a painter first. I make movies to support my painting habit. As soon as I finish a movie, I go right back to the easel.” George paints from life, memory and photographs.Painting from memory is something that took him a long time and a lot of patience to achieve, but it was worth it, because it improved his ability to think out a painting in abstract shapes and colors. He most enjoys painting from life and he likes to at least begin a painting outdoors, even if he ends up putting on the finishing touches in his studio. When he visits Bucks County, he always brings a camera with him. “If I can’t paint from life,” he says, “I paint from the many photos I have taken.”

George never went to art school. His training began with studying other painters and trial and error. Seeing that he needed more, he began an Barn Off Beaten Trail

apprenticeship with the internationally known impressionist painter, George Cherepov. “I was his apprentice for a few years. I was there countless hours. He taught me how to see. A lot of what he taught me was to not see things as objects but as color shapes with notes of color inside. He taught me about soft edges and hard edges.”

During and after this apprenticeship, George began to paint in a way that seemed to make the colors vibrate. He says, “Everything I’m doing I’m basing on the interaction of secondary colors.” Secondary colors are made through the combination of the primary colors red, blue and yellow. So, for example, red and yellow make orange and blue and red make purple and blue and yellow make green. The interesting thing about combining complimentary colors is that if you place colors next to each other that are at the opposite end of the color spectrum, you get them to vibrate—a technique used by Bucks County Farmhouse

River Road Circa 1893

Redfield and other Pennsylvania Impressionists.

A book by the Impressionist painter Emile Gruppe extended George’s knowledge of color theory. Gruppe painted exclusively outdoors like Redfield, and he further developed the color theory that was used by all the impressionistic painters. George explains that the cones in our eyes crave complimentary color and will even fill it in when it is not there. Nature itself presents what we see in this way. So, for example, red from fall leaves will make sheep painted

River in Winter

with white paint look pink in a painting. So by using complimentary colors correctly you not only get a vibrating effect, but you are actually painting the way things appear to the eye.

Knowing what colors to place next to each other, especially in an Impressionistic work, creates in the eye colors that are not really there but are expected, and not only that, it gives color a certain vibrancy that if taken to its extreme can even be “garish.” This is where the painter’s skill and feel for color must come into play.

George mixes his paints while painting. “I don’t use earth colors. I mix all the browns. I mix compliments, purples and orange. If you keep certain colors close together, when you step back from the painting, you see what the artist has seen in nature.”

George Gallo’s paintings are all large and vibrant. Even though in Impressionist style George puts the paint on thick and uses wide brush strokes, there is much subtlety in the composition sometimes with tiny bits of color and soft edged lines that are colored on a continuum of hue and value.

George Gallo has won many awards for his luminous paintings and has had several one-man shows at prestigious galleries in New York, including three at the Grand Central Gallery. His work is found in collections around the world and in the private collections of Robert DeNiro, Meg Ryan, Bruce Hornsby, Armin MuellerStahl and Mel Gibson.

George, whose large vibrant paintings are available through the Rich Timmons Fine Art Gallery, in Doylestown, misses his regular trips to Bucks County. “I would come to Bucks County constantly to paint, but with Covid, I haven’t been there for a year. I did a movie called Comeback Trail and a lead actor who lives in Bucks County asked me if I wanted to come stay with them when the pandemic is over. It’s not a good idea, because I’m never going to leave.” George admits that he plans to eventually leave the movie business and devote the rest of life to painting.

Work by George Gallo can be seen at the Rich Timmons Fine Art Gallery, located at 3795 Route 202, Doylestown, PA. For more information, call 267-247-5867 or visit www.3795gallery.com.

Bob Waite is the editor of Bucks County Magazine.

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