"16-20" Painting

Sabino Caputo is seventy-five years young, happily sharing the joy of total submersion in the sea of paints. Sabino is not a novice with brushes. At the age of five or six, his parents gave him a paint set for Christmas; I'm sure he would have appreciated a toy truck instead. His parents saw something special in him and nurtured that talent. As a young boy he apprenticed with a local Artist in a small southern Italian town, painting landscapes and restoring/retouching "scary" frescos in old dark churches. In 1963, his family came to the United States. Two years later he attended NYCC where he majored in Advertising Art. He earned his living as an Art Director, designing and producing print ads and collateral advertising material for the next thirty seven years. After retirement, he dusted off his brushes and resumed his passion, painting. It has become a full-time experience. Is he a contemporary Artist? Depends on what the meaning of "Contemporary" is. His style today is a merging of the "Classic" and the "New", labelling it "Modern Realism." His paintings contain both abstraction and representation. They are characterized by flatly painted geometric shapes in CMYK* derived mixtures of acrylic paint. Subjects are real, emotional and contemporary. He doesn't paint to fit a decor, but snippets of life, however pleasant or unpleasant they might seem. He wants viewers to look into his "windows" and feel the time and place. When viewed from a distance, these paintings are clearly what one sees, a quiet east side cafe, a dozing 34th St. vendor, 9/11, wild flowers, etc. At close range, their contiguous geometric shapes reveal a modern style that is uniquely his. The texture is generously achieved with multiple color layering. There are no curved lines or circles in his work, just straight sharp edged/shapes. The paintings tend to invite the viewers by letting their mind fill in those missing details.­ Sabino is constantly working on future projects. Where he is headed is hard to predict and claims that there will be "Modernism" in his future work. His ultimate desire is to leave a body of work that will endure and give countless hours of pleasure to those that will own his paintings. July 2020, created a new website where most of the past 10 + years work can be viewed, and made it available for purchase.