FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE: Salvatore Del Deo: Fisherman, Flowers, and a Few Fantasies: Recent Paintings The Exhibition opens on Friday, June 22 and continues through Sunday, July 15, with an opening reception Friday, June 22, from 7PM to 9PM. Salvatore Del Deo’s paintings are always a mix of deep feeling and painterly technique and the new work in this exhibition distills that mix to a rich concentration. One identifies with the painter’s compassionate gaze. Especially moving and beautiful this season are the mural-sized paintings, friezes, Del Deo calls them, based on the haunting loss of the scalloper Patricia Marie in 1978. These paintings are in commemoration of the seven local fishermen who went down that cold night in February, and the courage of their families, but one cannot fail to think that they also are a cry against the saddening loss of the town’s historic identity as a fishing community. These paintings in particular reveal the strong influence of Del Deo’s teacher Edwin Dickinson and his early exposure to the work of Diego Rivera in Mexico, who urged him to continue his work in fresco painting. Models for these paintings are local fishermen and some of them, sons of fishermen lost at sea. Through his painting, Del Deo is engaged in a spirited dialogue with the world, with nature. It is this challenge that has held his passion through the over fifty years of his painting career and has resulted in an immense and diverse body of work. His is a style that seems to traverse the continuum from the realistic to the abstract, with a natural fluidity available only to one who is thoroughly centered. He works with a visual vocabulary built up over years of study and looking and seeing. Del Deo has painted all the familiar scenes of his life at land's end -- fish, dunes, boats moored at the town wharf, trap sheds and lighthouses, the citizens, and here, the bright, sweet product of his garden -- all made new for the viewer through the painter's rich palette and soulful perspective. Here he is focusing his intensely refined, artistic eye through the lens of pure color - the color of joy in nature's simple beauty. Artists and art critics alike have stated: "Commitment, integrity and passion. Drawing and the sweet labors of painting, composition and color -- all these ingredients are combined to make the face and being of the artist Salvatore Del Deo." Varujan Boghosian, Sculptor. Del Deo has made paintings based on the here and now and also near-abstract works that engage the 'metaphysical unreal'. He is an artist of subtle sensibility." Eleanor Munroe, Art Critic. "I cannot separate Sal Del Deo, the man, from his art. Sal lives his art. That's why he is whole." Edward Giobbi, Painter |