Frank Capezerra
Frank Capezzera
Artist Statement:
These paintings are from my current body of work depicting figurative images, some from live models. They arise from my interest in the work of several waves of the Bay Area figurative art movement of the 60s, 70s and 80s. My paintings are efforts to fashion elements of the human form – a gesture, the nape of a neck, a sideways glance, piled hair, a breast in silhouette, the cant of a hip, – in fields of color. I like to think that these images arise from my inner self, and that they represent something essentially human and recognizable.
I always have been drawn to the mid 20th century American abstract expressionists – Hoffman, Klein, de Kooning and many others – but also to Edward Hopper, to whom I was introduced in South Truro when I was an eight-year-old aspiring artist. I did not follow a path to art; instead I became a lawyer and enjoyed a satisfying career as a partner in a Boston law firm. But I never lost the desire to find out how to create something like the paintings I had seen and loved. Over the decades I made small landscapes, portraits and genre images to stay connected to my artistic passion in the hope that some day I could fully commit to it.
Now I am able to devote all of my working energy to making art on a more ambitious scale and in ideas that interest me; and, with the help of great teachers, I find myself happily making my own paintings and searching for my own language.
These paintings are from my current body of work depicting figurative images, some from live models. They arise from my interest in the work of several waves of the Bay Area figurative art movement of the 60s, 70s and 80s. My paintings are efforts to fashion elements of the human form – a gesture, the nape of a neck, a sideways glance, piled hair, a breast in silhouette, the cant of a hip, – in fields of color. I like to think that these images arise from my inner self, and that they represent something essentially human and recognizable.
I always have been drawn to the mid 20th century American abstract expressionists – Hoffman, Klein, de Kooning and many others – but also to Edward Hopper, to whom I was introduced in South Truro when I was an eight-year-old aspiring artist. I did not follow a path to art; instead I became a lawyer and enjoyed a satisfying career as a partner in a Boston law firm. But I never lost the desire to find out how to create something like the paintings I had seen and loved. Over the decades I made small landscapes, portraits and genre images to stay connected to my artistic passion in the hope that some day I could fully commit to it.
Now I am able to devote all of my working energy to making art on a more ambitious scale and in ideas that interest me; and, with the help of great teachers, I find myself happily making my own paintings and searching for my own language.
Artist Bio:
Frank Capezzera is an artist self-taught from reading, art history study, online video, observation, drawing and mark making throughout his life. Frank has intensively studied the work of Edward Hopper, having read virtually all of the serious scholarship and commentary about him. Frank had a series of formative connections with Hopper very early in his life (1950’s) and beginning in the 1960’s to date. Frank has studied life drawing privately with Dick Stroud, a classically trained painter, as well as in classes at the MFA, MIT, the Provincetown Art Association, and the New Art Center with John Murray, a neo-post modern expressionist painter. Other studies include plein air painting with Mary Giammarino, Cape School of Art; watercolor and sumi-e painting with D’Wei Kwo, and personal study of Zen ink painting images and kanji.
