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On most days, before she ever picks up a brush, Teri Malo ’76 goes looking.
She walks the same network of conservation trails between Boston and Framingham—past ponds and swamps, through stands of pine and deciduous trees—watching for what has changed. The light, the waterline, the color of the shadows, the subtle shifts that mark a season in motion. She does not paint there. She absorbs it.
“I want to be in that environment,” she said. “So while I’m working on those paintings, I am mentally—and in my heart—in that place.”
At her studio in Framingham—a large, two-room space in a building shared with artists and artisans—those impressions begin to take form. Not as literal landscapes, but as something looser, more searching. Her paintings—layered, luminous, often rooted in water and sky—move steadily away from representation and toward what she calls “the spirit of the place.”
“It’s not what it looks like so much,” she said. “The facts are only in service to that.”
A Door Opens
Malo did not arrive at Emmanuel with a clear artistic path in mind. She chose the College, in part, for practical reasons: it was close to Boston’s medical district, where she had long received care, and she had earned a full scholarship. The College’s Art Department was, at the time, simply a possibility.
What she found was something more formative.
“It was pivotal,” she said. “To be able to just dive into studies and give it your all—and have really good relationships with the faculty—it opened a huge door.”
Among those Art Department faculty members was Michael Jacques, a printmaker whose influence would shape the course of her early career. His expectation—that students could succeed, and his commitment to helping them do so—left a lasting mark.
“I know that I would not have found that kind of almost one-on-one experience at a larger school,” she said. “It made all the difference.”
Malo became a printmaker, earning her MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and building a career exhibiting prints for more than a decade. Over time, her work began to shift—from printmaking to watercolor, and eventually to oil.
She found herself hand-coloring prints—and questioning why she wasn’t painting.
“It wasn’t a decision in one day,” she said. “It just kept going.”
Toward Abstraction
Today, Malo works exclusively in oil, though her approach still reflects her background in printmaking and watercolor. She brings printmaking techniques—rollers, scraping, and layered surfaces—into her paintings, building them up through translucent glazes and reworking.
Her process is iterative, exploratory. A painting may begin as a more literal rendering, only to be loosened, reworked, and abstracted until it feels right.
“The first time I look at something, I might try to paint it realistically,” she said. “And then realize—that’s not it.”
What she is after is something less fixed: a feeling, a resonance, a recognition that may not correspond to a single, specific place.
Her paintings are often rooted in landscapes—woodlands, waterways, and conservation areas across New England—but they are rarely literal. Built from memory, photographs, and repeated observation, they distill a place into something more atmospheric. Many of her recent works explore transition—meadows giving way to forest, water shifting with light and season—capturing environments not as fixed scenes, but as living systems in flux.
When a painting succeeds, she said, viewers often respond with a kind of certainty.
“They’ll say, ‘I know that place.’ And whether it’s actually that place or not, what it’s telling me is that they know a place in their heart that feels like it.”
Working in Series
Malo’s paintings unfold in series—an approach that mirrors the way she comes to understand a landscape.
“The first painting is just feeling your way,” she said. “But the longer you look, the more it reveals.”
Over time, repetition becomes a form of inquiry. Each return to a place deepens the work: new details emerge, patterns shift, the familiar becomes newly complex. In recent years, she has focused on areas close to home, revisiting them multiple times a week, tracking subtle environmental changes—including those shaped by climate change.
“It’s really like a whole different place from what it was even 15 years ago,” she said.
Water, in particular, continues to draw her in—its mutability, its layered reflections, its sense of an “upside and an upside down.”
“There’s so much going on underneath the surface,” she said.
A Life at Fenway Studios
If Malo’s work is rooted in place, so too is her life.
She has lived at Fenway Studios, a historic artists’ cooperative in Boston, since the early 1980s, shortly after it transitioned to a co-op model. The structure, she said, made a full-time artistic life possible.
“If I were paying market rates for everything, it wouldn’t have been possible,” she said. “The co-op model makes a huge difference.”
Over the years, she has taken on a leadership role at the coop, serving multiple terms as president and helping guide the building through moments of uncertainty, including efforts to preserve its light and integrity in the face of nearby development.
More recently, she has helped transform a former studio space into a shared gallery and community hub—one that brings together artists, musicians, and students.
In partnership with institutions like Berklee College of Music, the space now hosts exhibitions, performances, and collaborative projects. Malo is particularly interested in the intersections between disciplines: the way music might inform painting, or how artists and musicians might respond to one another’s work.
Malo has begun exploring new forms of collaboration—most notably with cellist, composer, and songwriter Danny Sea, a Berklee graduate. Working across disciplines, she has experimented with translating music into paint, listening closely to rhythm, tone, and movement as she works.
“It’s like playing a different instrument,” she said. “You feel the rhythm of it in your body.”
In one instance, she painted while listening repeatedly to one of Sea’s compositions, allowing its cadence and emotional tone to guide her brushstrokes. The result was not an illustration of the music, but a parallel expression—another way of getting at what lies beneath the surface.
She is also eager to create opportunities for emerging artists, including the possibility of internships for Emmanuel students.
“I want to make it a place where people can try things,” she said. “Where the process itself is fostering something.”
Malo’s work is shown widely, with representation at galleries across New England and beyond, including Powers Gallery in Acton, Greylock Gallery in Williamstown, and The Laffer Gallery in upstate New York, along with Sono Fine Art in Connecticut and international platforms such as Visto Art.
After decades of sustained work, Malo remains as committed to her practice as ever—still in the studio five days a week, still returning to the landscapes that continue to shape her.
When she speaks with young artists, her advice is direct.
“You’re probably not going to get rich,” she said. “But if you can make enough to live on, you can be extraordinarily happy.”
The more important question, she tells them, is simpler—and more difficult.
“What do you really care about?” she said. “That’s what you have to be painting.”
Because in the end, the work—like the landscapes she studies so closely—is not about replication. It is about attention, immersion, and a willingness to stay with something long enough for it to reveal itself.
Now on view: Teri Malo's solo exhibition, Old Meadows and Young Woods, at the Linden Street Gallery, Summer Star Wildlife Sanctuary (690 Linden St., Boylston, MA).
Reception: April 25 | 1:00–4:30 p.m. | On view through June 1, 2026
