I have always felt that I was blessed with gifts of the creative spirit which I inherited from my beloved parents, Marie and Peter.

They each had a poetic way of seeing, and knowing things, talents for perceiving human nature which, in their own lives, did not become expressed artistically but which, for me, were very definitely artistic tendencies to be harnessed, mainly because, unlike my parents, who had to leave school and work when they were very young, I was given the freedom and the opportunity to do personal, creative things. I am eternally grateful to them for giving me that freedom.

Growing up was fun for many reasons, not the least of which being that I always had access to two different neighborhoods: my parents’ apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and my grandmother’s building, from the late 19th century, in historic Little Italy/Chinatown, on Mulberry street.

I became interested in painting when I was 15, at Nazareth Regional High School. I began painting little abstract pictures in water color around the same time that I became acquainted with The Ash Can School. Later on, I discovered some of the masters of the 20th Century: Picasso; Matisse; Dali. Having seen Citizen Kane, my photographs were filled with oblique angles, deep focus perspectives, and shadows.

At New York University, where I majored in cinema studies and film production, I continued painting, and also did some film-making.

My vision of what my art could do became more and more focused, as I tried to take Warhol’s obsession with the famous as a basis for exploring the dark side of fame. My depictions of famous people was (and still is) based on a style that is a combination of abstraction and primitivism, with the occasional aid of photo journalism in the form of collage.

On the 50th Anniversary of JFK Assassination

My most ambitious series to date has been a 50 work series devoted to the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK in 2013. I tried to combine familiar media imagery from the weekend of November 22nd 1963 with abstractions of form, to make original statements about this iconic socio-cultural-political event. As in most of my works, the media and forms include collage, acrylic, water color, charcoal pencil, oil, assemblage boxes, dioramas, mobiles, sculpture, and conceptual pieces.

I hope that by offering dozens and dozens of works based upon the lives of many different persons, famous in all walks of life, who died tragically at a relatively young age, with figures as different and distant from one another as JFK and Amy Winehouse, that I am showing the world how much fuller we are when they touch our lives, and, in the end, how much emptier we become from losing them.

See my art collection website at https://peterdellolio.com/

Below is a sample gallery of works from the JFK series. You can click on the images for a larger view.