The Artist
Artist Statement
Timothy Gianelli paints imagined landscapes that seem to exist at the edge of ordinary experience. Working in oil on canvas, he builds scenes from paths, openings, dense trees, cliffs, water, and charged skies, using familiar elements of the natural world to create places that feel distant, magnetic, and slightly off limits. His paintings often suggest a moment before entry: a path narrowing into darkness, a gap appearing in a wall of trees, a small figure paused before a space that feels both inviting and unsafe.
The emotional origin of Gianelli’s work reaches back to childhood. When he was young, his mother warned him never to go into the woods alone, because sometimes people go in and do not come out. That warning stayed with him. It transformed the woods into something more than landscape. They became a place of mystery, danger, curiosity, and pull. The feeling of being drawn toward a place one is not supposed to enter has remained central to both his lifelong passion for exploring and the imagined worlds he creates in paint.
Rather than depicting specific locations, Gianelli constructs psychological landscapes. Trees, sky, ground, and water hold together as recognizable spaces, but their logic is often subtly altered. A path may feel too deliberate. A clearing may appear too still. A passage may seem to open and close at the same time. Through these shifts, the paintings create a tension between beauty and unease, asking the viewer to remain suspended at the edge of decision.
Gianelli’s visual language is shaped by artists who use landscape as a vehicle for feeling rather than description. Milton Avery’s simplified forms, compressed space, and emotional color have been especially important to his sense of structure. He is also drawn to Caspar David Friedrich’s use of landscape as a spiritual and psychological stage, where the individual appears small before something vast, mysterious, and unreachable. Charles Burchfield’s animated landscapes, in which trees, skies, weather, and atmosphere seem charged with inner life, have become another important point of reference. Gertrude Abercrombie’s strange, intimate worlds, where ordinary places and objects take on dreamlike significance, also inform his interest in psychological space. Van Gogh’s charged skies, restless surfaces, and emotional intensity further shape Gianelli’s understanding of landscape as an inner state rather than a fixed location. Peter Doig’s dreamlike, memory laden approach to landscape has also become important to Gianelli’s thinking, especially in the way familiar places can feel distant, haunted, and unresolved.
Gianelli’s paintings are ultimately about the pull of places that feel alive before they are fully understood. They invite the viewer toward an opening, a path, or a distant light, while keeping the meaning of that invitation unresolved. Often, the landscape begins to dissolve or collapse around the event the figure is fixated on, as if the entire world is being pulled toward that point. This movement gives the paintings their forward pressure. The image does not sit still. It narrows, bends, and gathers itself around the thing that cannot be ignored. Each work holds the viewer at the edge of something beautiful, uncertain, and quietly dangerous.
Artist Bio
Born in Boston and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gianelli is a self taught painter. His interest in art began early. At age ten, he exhibited work at the deCordova Museum in Massachusetts, an experience that helped shape his sense of art as a serious lifelong pursuit. After returning to painting with renewed focus as an adult, he began developing a body of work centered on imagined landscapes, forbidden places, and the strange emotional charge of entering the unknown. His work has been shown at Pellas Gallery.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2025 "Surrealism Goes to the Beach" - Pellas Gallery, Boston, MA
2024 "No Borders" - Pellas Gallery, Boston, MA
2023 "Abstraction, Expressionism, and Beyond" - Pellas Gallery, Boston
2021 "Atypical Renaissance" - Pellas Gallery, Boston, MA
