PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM 117 If you’ve ever found yourself mesmerized by the undulating, rippling surface of a pond, you’ll likely feel an affinity toward the paintings of Joseph Fuchs. Though water isn’t always featured in the artist’s city and nature scapes, it flows through many of his atmospheric works of art. “Essentially the water is an abstract,” the Los Altos painter describes. “You have to try to get the range of colors and shapes.” That many of Joseph’s canvases are awash with depictions of bobbing Venetian scenery should come as no surprise. “The first time I went, it was almost like that previous life experience where you walk into a place and you fit… I was more than enchanted!” reflects Joseph, who first fell for Italy’s “City of Canals” back in the ‘80s. The landscape was quite different from the endless orchards of Joseph’s hometown, where the only action was the occasional groan of a Boeing B-52 coming and going from nearby Moffett Field. As a seventh-generation Peninsula native, Joseph describes the Los Altos of his boyhood as “a drowsy, sleepy place.” “It wasn’t important. It was just a nice place to grow up,” he recollects. “A dog could go to sleep in the middle of the street and never be run over!” But back to the water and Joseph’s unquenchable wanderlust—because over the years, he’s revisited Venice over a dozen times. “You can go back and see it a second time—and a third and a fourth—and it’s always a little different. And the more you do that, the richer it is,” the octogenarian says. Joseph, who taught English at Menlo-Atherton High School for 33 years, even spent his sixmonth sabbatical living there. He painted every morning, then wandered the streets after lunch, returning back again in the evenings. “I would find a direction and just walk,” he says. “I would go different routes every single time.” ABOVE: La Scuola by Joseph Fuchs.
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