About Joseph Piccillo

My roots in painting began as primarily a landscape representational watercolorist, so I think that part of me remains in the work.  As I matured as an artist I moved to abstraction, first using oils and then acrylics, initially the work was quite textural and done with palette knife.  Color and line interested me and I let the process lead me and I see myself as a color field painter. 

A few years ago, I was asked to do a show in Sicily where I live for part of the year.    Being in a small town in the mountains of central Sicily, I wasn't able to find the materials I needed to do the larger scale abstracts, so I decided to paint small, representational work and while working, I found that the principles I was using in the abstracts I was also applying to the watercolors and simultaneously simplifying as I went.  It was a kind of reducing the image to the essential while I wanted the viewer to see what I saw, I also wanted the viewer to find the universal in the painting on their own. I wasn't reporting what I saw. I was saying this is how it appears to me and these paintings weren't answers but rather questions.

The show was made up of about 30 works in vignette-style watercolor depicting ordinary life in this tiny town.  The question I was asking was, “Do I get it?” “Do I understand Sicily and the Sicilian?”  Coming back to the U.S., this concept of reducing the work to the essential became the genesis for my current paintings.