Christopher Volpe
Where Mystery Meets Beauty

Twilight Song, 2025
Tar and Oil on Canvas | 48 x 60 in (121.9 x 152 cm)

We're delighted to introduce Christopher Volpe, a poetic painter whose alchemy of tar, gold leaf, and oil transforms raw materials into visions that invite us to reflect on our world, our mortality, and our shared destiny.

He returns to the easel with a sense of vital urgency, pursuing a quest for meaning and clarity while seeking to reveal what is timeless and essential.

In his hands, paint becomes more than pigment- it becomes a vessel for the fullness of the human experience. His works embrace both shadow and light, weaving them into beauty that honors truth, illuminates mystery, and opens the heart to wonder.

Volpe's work is collected internationally and held in the permanent collections of Smith College and the Whistler House Museum. Grants and awards include the Saint Botolph Club Foundation, MassMoCA/Assets for Artists, and the NH State Council on the Arts Artist Advancement Grant. With degrees from the University of New Hampshire and Stony Brook University, he has taught painting, literature, mythology, and the history of art at various colleges and universities. 

Step inside the mind of Christopher Volpe in this exclusive interview:

1. How did you get your start as an artist? 

I came to painting from a lifelong immersion in literature, philosophy, Western esotericism and mystical traditions. I was on winter break from teaching a humanities course at a local college when the dean called and asked me to fill in for an art history instructor who’d suddenly gone awol. I didn’t feel qualified (I have a graduate degree in writing poetry) but I took the job and ended up pretty much falling in love with American painting. At some point, I just decided I wanted to try painting with oils myself. Images in painting work much the same as images in poetry, but then there’s this physical manifestation with the paint itself – I couldn’t get over the immediacy, the tactility, the physical nature of it – the way energy, ideas, and emotions can be embodied in concrete form. I still savor the materials, plasticity and sensuality of oil paint and the strange and unpredictable qualities of the liquefied coal tar I’m using a lot right now. 
 
2. Is there a philosophy, or a certain message, behind your work? 

I aspire to make paintings that turn the pain and confusion of being human into a kind of beauty that doesn’t deny the darkness or sugarcoat reality but still insists on a lyrical engagement, not just with the world around us, but with the deeper mysteries of the human heart. I like to believe art can negotiate with our demons and recycle the culture’s toxins, sometimes literally; the tar I use in my current work arrives as a byproduct from the extraction of oil from coal. So, for me it’s a signifier for industrialism and specifically the burning of fossil fuels as well as being the alchemical prima materia par excellence. I think of the tar as totally base matter that I’m attempting to transmute into something resonant with beauty, meaning, and mystery. 

3. Can you tell me a little bit about your process? How do the pieces come together? 

First I treat the raw tar, which comes in a thick liquid form. I use a chemical drier to thin it and render it workable and stable. I coat the substrate with spray-on auto primer and apply the treated tar with brushes and knives, searching for the image or the expression via a process of adding and subtracting material as I go. An improvisational approach feels natural to me, as a way of bypassing the rational and coaxing more subtle mental energies into material form.
 
4. Your work is so expressive. Where does that energy come from? Where do you find your inspiration? 

I think I find inspiration in hidden, out-of-the-way, or underappreciated aspects of our physical and especially our mental lives. The painting is a record of an urge to create some kind of response, both in my own individual life and in the lives of the people who connect with it. It’s also a desperate act to take back agency in a world predicated on ignoring or even suppressing the most important things that make us human. What keeps me coming back to the easel is a perpetual unrest and an urge to be part of some imagined (and hopefully real?) collective search for meaning and satisfaction. It’s the same impulse I had as a writer and a teacher of poetry and mythology – an attempt to make some sense of what’s going on and figure out what’s important before we die.

5. What can we expect from your current series?

I’m constantly discovering new ways of working with my materials – and adding new ones – that suggest whole new avenues of creativity and image-making. But the constant is the feeling I keep going back to, the same one we all had as adolescents before the system robbed us of it – that something is fundamentally wrong with the course we’ve set and yet, there are (there must be!) saving mysteries and wonders close at hand if we’re willing to seek for them. 
 
6. What are your thoughts about the broader art world?

In a society that wants you glued to a screen because profits take priority over nearly everything else, giving your attention to art is a rebellious act. But when “the market” privileges art that abdicates its responsibility for enhancing the social fabric in ways that only sincere art can do, it perpetuates a broken system, diminishes art’s importance, and ultimately undermines its inestimable worth. It’s a two-way street, but we all need to be creating and rewarding more authenticity – we all need more hard-won human expressions capable of breaking our hearts.

Featured Works:

Christopher Volpe | Untitled #1
Tar, salt, ash, titanium white oil on paper

Christopher Volpe | Untitled #2
Tar, salt, ash, titanium white oil on paper

Christopher Volpe | Westward #18, 2025
Tar, oil and gold leaf on cradled birch panel | 24 x 36 in (61 x 91.4 cm)

Christopher Volpe | A Living Calendar of Days, 2023
Tar, Salt, Ash, Titanium White Oil Paint | 36 x 36 in (91.4 x 91.4 cm)

Christopher Volpe | Noir-Flare
Oil on canvas 

Christopher Volpe | Yes, the World’s a Ship on Her Passage Out, 2017
Tar and oil on canvas | 48 x 48 in (121.9 x 121.9 cm)

Christopher Volpe | Bavarian Gentians, 2024
Tar and Oil on Wood | 18 x 24 in (45.7 x 61 cm)

Christopher Volpe | Event Horizon #2, 2019
Tar and Oil on Canvas | 24 x 30 in (61 x 76 cm)

Christopher Volpe | Event Horizon, 2019
Tar and Oil on Canvas | 48 x 48 in (121.9 x 121.9 cm)

Christopher Volpe | Any Human Thing, 2015
Oil and tar on canvas | 36 x 48 in (91.4 x 121.9 cm)

Christopher Volpe | Of the Poetry of Natural Forces, 2023
Tar and Oil on Canvas | 48 x 48 in (121.9 x 121.9 cm)

Christopher Volpe | The Night Follows Close (with Millions of Suns,
and Sleep and Restoring Darkness), 2025
Tar and gold leaf on wood panel | 24 in (61 cm)

“Tar is the earth, it’s ancient life, primal material from millions of years of prehistoric time, and it is central to our story right now, in our own time in history.” -Christopher Volpe

To learn more about Christopher Volpe we invite you to watch this exclusive PBS interview where he connects environmental conditions to our historic, literary past:

Thank you for being part of the Georges Bergès Gallery family. Our commitment is always to search the world to bring you works of art that both inspire and are meaningful- artists that will come to define the art world, of tomorrow.