Artwork by Grosso



Joseph of Copertino
I began to draw before I learned how to read. It was obvious to me until Junior High that I was going to be a painter. But in High School I got hooked on philosophy. Even so, I never quit drawing and painting. I think of art as my spiritual practice (I don't have a religion). 

The satisfaction I get from painting vies with all the rest of life’s pleasures. Painting for me is a psychic phenomenon -- something is materialized out of my head! Mind you, there are dark nights of the soul in making art. But you take a chance and it starts to come to life – and you feel more alive. And on you go until that moment it all comes together – color, value, form. It’s then that heightened (really exquisite) pleasure goes through you, followed by an afterglow. Art is my guardian angel -- always there for when I need a vacation from the real world. 

To purchase artwork contact Michael Grosso at grosso.michael@gmail.com

 
Boys at the Beach

Boys at the Beach

Based on a photo I took of two kids at the Jersey shore in the 1980s.











Misery Meets Misery


This painting does not exist. It is amalgamated from images drawn, photographed, or remembered from Rome and Florence.


Misery Meets Misery does exist- encoded in digital form.

Art in the twilight zone.






Portrait of Joseph of  C.


Portrait of Joseph of C.

This portrait of Joseph may be used as an icon of divine self centeredness.  Let the lamp affix its beam, as Wallace Stevens put it.

I maintain it is a strange fact of nature that by means of a certain focus of attention, it is possible to bend gravity.

Concentrate on that idea. Who knows about the limits of the human will?












Abstraction Without a Name



Abstraction Without a Name


I keep faltering on giving this painting a name. 

Call it a nameless abstraction. 

Still, it illustrates a motif about space, which further examples may appear later on the line-up.













Still Life With Time as a Subject

Still Life With Time as a Subject

There is also a hint of serene drunkenness wrestling with the demon of time.

So can we say that art is about making life still; time stops.  Is that a needed service? Finding the still center of the whirling cosmos? 










Time Frozen in Pictorial Space



Time Frozen in Pictorial Space

Drawing of After-Dinner Scene
















Faces Before the Law

Faces Before the Law

This drawing is part of series begun from a publication called
Crime Times, cost one dollar, with pages and pages of mug shots of people arrested for (mostly) minor offenses.  I just focus on their images and try to bring out some quality of humanity.  No names or specifics, just images of the human face.




Faces Before the Law-2




  Before the Law

















Faces Before the Law-3





 Before the Law
 
 

Faces Before the Law-4



Before the Law











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