John Asaro

( 2/28/37 - )

A native Californian of Sicilian descent, John Asaro grew up some twenty miles from the picturesque beaches of Point Loma and the visually stimulating, multi-cultural city of San Diego. The artist began to experiment with a combination of palette knife and brush techniques to attain on canvas the fleeting essence found in nature. Going outdoors to sketch briskly the essentials of a transitory scene, Asoro finishes most of his paintings in the studio as he listens to recorded Gregorian chants, the classical music of Puccini and Verdi or the energetic voices of Luciano Pavarotti and Leontyne Price.

Asaro's purpose is to produce excellent paintings and to remain innocent as he grows artistically and searches for substructures in art. He strives to make his style, content and subjects as personal and candid as possible, so that a capacious audience will understand the relevance of it. "When art is understood by many, " Asaro asserts, "it helps to connect us and we are all the better for it. Art is self realization."

The distinquished paintings of John Asaro capture immediate fleeting impressions rather than permanent aspects of a subject. His sumptuous, flowing brushwork allows the viewer to explore nuances of reality and truth. Within layers of beautifully orchestrated pigments, Asaro's virile strokes of paint dash, swish, swirl and leash out to represent light, atmosphere, motion of direct and reflected colors in open air and the complexity of the human condition.

Asaro was motivated by Milford Ellison, a watercolor instructor and inspired by the works of Rembrandt, Rubens, Money, Sargent, Sorolla, Matisse and Bonnard. He studied with Donal Hord, San Diego (1952-1955); the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California (1955-1957, 1959); with Frank Reilly at the Art Students Leaque, New York City (1958-1959); and architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Santa Monica, California. For more than twelve years, he created illustrations for Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, and Argosy magazines in Detroit, New York and Los Angeles. Asaro is a member of the New York Illustrator's Club and California Art Club. He has featured in articles in Art Talk, Southwest Art, The Santa Fean, Horizon, Focus/Santa Fe magazines and in a 1990 Lexus television commercial.