Smoke Ring

Rory Berthiaume (b. 1984, Washington State, USA) is an American painter living and working between New York City and the Catskills.

His practice moves fluidly through abstraction, figuration, and landscape painting across both intimate and monumental scales. Through layering, revision, and acts of erasure, Berthiaume creates paintings that feel in constant motion — images surfacing, dissolving, and reforming in ways that invite openness rather than certainty.

In this recent body of work, Berthiaume leans into atmospheres of wonder, intimacy, and transformation. The paintings unfold as luminous emotional landscapes where memory, imagination, and sensation drift together in radiant suspension. Figures emerge like passing apparitions within fields of diffused color, while expansive terrains evoke spaces of reflection, possibility, and quiet transcendence.