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Nicholas Caputi
Tusayan 32X28 Acrylic Sold.
© 2008 Nicholas Caputi
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Nicholas L. Caputi: A chronology of my life in art
I started painting while working as a pastry chef during high school. There, my teacher, Sister Peraclita, SHJ, recognized talent and encouraged me to look beyond the surface of persons, nature, and object to find color, design, and inner significance. She taught me composition, the multiple use of media, and drawing.
At St. Mary's College, I studied under Brother Kyran, FSC, learning the fundamentals of art creation and the translation into reality of the soul's impulse to paint. I studied a considerable spectrum of art history as well.
At UC, I experimented with many media and forms, reaching for what would become my "voice" as a painter. I continued to study art history.
During my first years of teaching, I was given art classes to teach as well as my regular program of classical languages and English. I began painting seriously during this period, showed in shopping center exhibitions, and was juried into several large civic art shows. During the same period, art galleries in Kensington and in Berkeley, California took up my work, where I sold almost everything I painted - some 200 works.
Later, after moving back to San Francisco, I began producing block prints of quail and rhinoceros as well as abstract paintings. Two of my quail prints hang in the Del Monte lodge in Carmel and over 50 of the rhinos are in private collections. I also started contributing one painting annually to the KQED auction, graduating to the Big Board. I continued this practice for over twenty-five years. Later I was exhibited with Kathy Kolwitz in the Lesser Gallery on Sutter Street in San Francisco, in a two-artist show. The exhibit resulted in my selling several mixed media pieces, and being invited to show in Dusseldorf, Germany in an exhibition sponsored by the German Embassy in San Francisco. Concurrently, I had one man shows in the Crocker Bank in San Francisco, and at Holy Names College.
During this time, I applied for and won a Guggenheim Grant, which afforded me the opportunity to travel Europe, studying wonderful works of art in the great museums and galleries. My favorite painters are Toulouse-Lautrec, Michelangelo, and Egon Schiele. It was an intense and informative time in my life. The period culminated in my studying a year at Oxford, England, again an intense and illuminating experience.
Upon my return, I learned that the US Navy art director had become interested in commissioning some 30 of my works, for reproduction in four-color serigraphs, for sale at Navy art centers. This was not only an honor - it was lucrative as well.
When I returned from Europe, I began interpreting the circle and the cruciform in my works, moving into watercolors, mixed media, and oils. Largely, during this period, I sold to private collectors from my studio in San Francisco.
I paint because I have to. I see the world through a juxtaposition of angles. As Lisa Brett, Ph.D., Stanford University, has written about my work, "In Caputi's paintings, the idea predominates. The reconciliation is of the dependency, the non-isolation of being - the pain of existence- with apotheosis of man himself, man the self-masker. The predominance of the curved line as protection, as matrix, is an assertion of the continuum of experience; the enigma of the experience itself is the irony. These ideologically complex paintings are permeated with an awareness of the turmoil of space as it relates to the precarious balance of man's being in time." I believe that art takes us beyond the actual into the possible, the subliminal, and, eventually, the transcendental.
Most recently, I won "Best in Show," two "First Places," and one "Second Place" in the Plumas County annual art exhibit. This has resulted in my invitation to enter several paintings in next year's Sacramento State Fair Art Exhibition. It is a highly juried show, but my awards in other counties gained me professional status and thus invitational participation. Most recently, in 2005, I won two first place awards, two second place, and one third place in the Sacramento County Fair art exhibition. All nine of my submitted works were juried into that show.
October, 2004
View works by visiting digital consciousness galleries below or by sending a request for pictures or any work to my e-mail address: kyros220@aol.com.
The latter will allow me to show you the work, framed and unframed, as well as several different shots of it. Thank you.
FROM NOW UNTIL MAY 1, 2008, I WILL SELL ANY PAINTING FOR HALF THE LISTED PRICE. EACH WORK IS PROFESSIONALLY FRAMED AND READY TO HANG.
Nicholas Caputi's 29 Digital Consciousness galleries
Studios of Nicholas Caputi
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