The paintings of Joseph D. Marchetti are on display at the Bucks County Visitor Center, 3207 Street Road in Bensalem, through Jan. 7 in the exhibit “Places I Remember.” The center is open Monday through Sunday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Marchetti, a graduate of Central High School in Philadelphia and Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, is an art teacher in the School District of Philadelphia. He serves as the department chair for Humanities at the Philadelphia High School for Girls.
His exhibit includes paintings that represent over two years of work in Bucks, Lancaster and Lehigh counties. The body of work started with a painting of the Schofield-Ford Covered Bridge in Tyler State Park and now includes covered bridges, farms, barns and castles in Pennsylvania. Of the 26 paintings, 24 were created during COVID-19 lockdown. Plein Air painting was the perfect escape from the stress and anxiety of those trying times. At the end of the school year, Marchetti lost one sister, and in the middle of the summer, lost another.
“These farms were the backbone of Pennsylvania and sadly, many are being lost to modernization and housing development,” Marchetti said. “These paintings document some of them. They remind me of my childhood in upstate Pennsylvania where my family resides from Carbon County through Luzerne County. That is why I title the work ‘Places I Remember.’ The farms and barns are links to the past, many seem so familiar and their stories are slowly disappearing.”
