About the Artist
Chris Kolupski is a Rochester, New York-based landscape painter whose work focuses on the light, color, and geology of the American West. He paints both on location and in the studio, in oils, and his style sits somewhere between realism and impressionism, building paintings through value organization, direct brushwork, and palette knife technique. His paintings aim for strong, simplified shapes rather than surface detail, letting the mark itself carry meaning.
Chris began painting outdoors as a teenager in the forests of Upstate New York and Canada. He later studied portraiture and figure painting with Nelson Shanks, Everett Raymond Kinstler, and Deane Keller at the Art Students League of New York. That training, particularly Shanks’ emphasis on value structure through Notan sketching, became the foundation of his approach to landscape. In 2004, he founded Boxart Street Atelier in Rochester, where he taught figurative and landscape painting for ten years. A 2017 painting trip through Utah and Colorado refocused his practice entirely on outdoor landscape work.
He is the founder of Paint Out West, now in its sixth year, a workshop series that takes two forms. The virtual workshop follows Chris into the field across a wide range of western locations, including Zion, Canyon de Chelly, the Grand Tetons, and the Grand Canyon, with students painting along from wherever they are. Live workshops are currently held in and around Moab, Utah, with painting sessions on location at Arches National Park, Canyonlands, and Dead Horse Point.
His work is represented at Thunderbird Foundation Gallery in Mt. Carmel, Utah.
CHRIS KOLUPSKI: PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST
excerpts from Life in the Finger Lakes magazine, Jan / Feb 2021 by Nancy E. McCarthy
In the spring of 2017, Rochester artist Chris Kolupski had just completed a large, complex project for a corporate client. He felt depleted and looked forward to unwinding by painting landscapes outdoors during a Utah and Colorado vacation with his wife Michele and their two children. “Hiking, painting and travel is as good as it gets for me as an artist,” he says.
The couple journeyed out west every couple of years, but this trip would present an unexpected turning point for Kolupski. In solitude and immersed in nature, he realized these excursions were his favorite painting experiences. His prolific art career had concentrated on illustration and portraiture, but he made the decision to return his main focus to landscapes when he returned home.
Back to Nature
Kolupski credits his high school art teacher David DeClerk for making a significant impact on his early artistic evolution. The teacher was a watercolorist and architectural illustrator, which provided a window into the possibility of an art career for Kolupski.
DeClerk took his class on outdoor painting field trips and introduced his students to representational American painters and illustrators such as Winslow Homer, Norman Rockwell, and the Wyeth family – a style not in vogue in the ’80s. DeClerk served as a live model by hopping on a desk and posing like a Roman soldier with a broom as a spear.
During Kolupski’s annual Canadian vacations with his parents and three sisters, he would spend his time painting lake and forest scenes and fishing. Out of high school, Kolupski taught painting classes at a frame shop, but his first steady art income was as a freelance architectural illustrator. This was before computer-generated design, so Kolupski drew freehand to scale.
In 1995, after a five-year illustration position at a Rochester-based engineering and design firm, Kolupski moved to Brooklyn Heights, NY, to produce Biblical and historical illustrations for the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York. It was a fruitful artistic period; he transitioned from watercolor to oil, shadowing a staff illustrator to learn the fine points of color mixing. Kolupski had always appreciated the wider range that the oil medium offered, but was held back by turpentine fumes. “I discovered hospital-grade, odorless paint thinner, and I was on my way,” he explains.
Kolupski also began to take classes at the renowned Art Students League of New York (ASL), studying portraiture and figure painting with Everett Raymond Kinstler, Deane Keller, and Nelson Shanks. Even after moving back to Rochester in 1998, Kolupski went back to take ASL classes and later at Shanks’ Philadelphia studio.
Shanks taught Kolupski how to classify values using a 2-value Notan sketch as a reference for a painting. Sketching in simple black and white allows for the exploration of light and dark values without the distraction of color, texture, and details. “It was an epiphany and truly a gift,” says Kolupski. The Notan technique also works well as a tool for plein air (outdoor) painting, where the natural light shifts rapidly and the artist works quickly to capture a scene.
The Romance of Art
In 2000, Kolupski was teaching a series of watercolor painting classes at the George Eastman House in Rochester when he met his future wife Michele Myers, one of his students. Feelings clicked when Kolupski stole some of her fries during lunch. They married in 2001 and have two children: Violet was born in 2006 and Harrison in 2013.
After Kolupski rededicated himself to landscape painting in 2017, he began to successfully compete in plein air competitions in the Finger Lakes and out west, collecting awards ranging from Honorable Mention to Best in Show. After more than 30 years of perfecting a precise, realistic style, Kolupski is purposely riding the edge between realism and impressionism. He now eschews highly rendered images in favor of brush marks that symbolize form and imply detail. “I’m excited by the beauty of strong mark making, the aesthetic value of paint itself, independent of what it represents,” says Kolupski. “When everything is clicking, my emotional response is relayed to the viewer, no matter what I’m painting.”
“His strong brush strokes and palette knife marks make the canvas come to life,” says Fairport floral designer Lise Buonocore, one of Kolupski’s students and a collector of his work. Buonocore takes Kolupski’s group classes, held outdoors at various scenic Rochester locations. Before the students paint on their own, Kolupski provides a live demo. “I so enjoy watching his plain canvas board turn into a stunning painting,” Buonocore says.
Though Kolupski has a home studio, his favorite studio is anywhere outdoors. He’s especially drawn to rock formations sculpted by water and wind, or streams that carve their way down to form glens and waterfalls. “That’s why I love painting in the Finger Lakes, especially Naples,” he says. “One of these days I’ll hike up High Tor again and do a sketch for every waterfall, all the way up.”
For this artist, that project would be his heaven on Earth.
https://www.lifeinthefingerlakes.com/chris-kolupski-portrait-of-an-artist/ Used by permission.
Awards
2025 Plein Air Salon-Best Western: "Private Balcony"
2025 Plein Air Salon-Top Finalist: "Time and Distance"
2025 Plein Air Salon-Top Finalist: "Of Earth and Sky"
2025 Plein Air Salon-Top Finalist: "When it Happens"
2025 Plein Air Salon-Top Finalist: "Standing Alone"
2021 Monuments and Canyons Invitational -3rd Place
2021 Monuments and Canyons Invitational -Honorable Mention
2020 Rochester Art Club Annual Show -Juror’s Award
2019 Moab Plein Air, Moab UT -Honorable Mention
2019 Finger Lakes Plein Air -Quickdraw Winner
2019 Finger Lakes Plein Air Main Competition -Honorable Mention
2018 Genesee Valley Plein Air Painters Annual Meeting -Artist’s Choice award
2018 Genesee Valley Plein Air Painters Annual Show -Best in Show
2018 Moab Plein Air, Moab UT -Honorable mention
2017 Genesee Valley Plein Air Painters Annual Show -Best in Show
2017 Rochester Art Club Annual Show -People’s Choice Award
Notable Commissions Include:
Family portrait for Jonathan Judge, CEO of Paychex Corporation
Portrait of Marvin Sands, founder of Constellation Brands
Portrait of Thomas Clarkson, founder Clarkson University
Portrait of James Neely, founder of AMSA Corporation
Portrait of John Odenbach Sr., founder of The Dolomite Group
Portrait of MM Ewing, for the MM Ewing Continuing Care Center
Mural: The School of Priority Thinking; a 58 figure homage to Rafael's School of Athens, commissioned By Peter DiMarco of Institute 4 Priority Thinking
Ken Smith Architects, a cycle of more than 20 portraits of the entire staff
