Salvatore Pecoraro’s career as a California Artist/Teacher spans over five decades. With the idea of always teaching and creating art, Pecoraro attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland from 1953 to 1957 and then earned a Masters Degree in Art from San Francisco State University from 1963 to 1966.
Beginning as a painter his work has always strived to be innovative. In the late 1960's, Pecoraro established himself in the San Francisco Bay Area with the debut of a series of 16 large acrylic paintings containing female faces with geometric forms combined with clouds and rainbows called Pinole. Between late 1969 and January 1971, he then created the ambitious 365 Skies 1970, made up of 365 foot square vacuumed formed styrene panels. Pecoraro took a color-slide photograph of each day of 1970 at different times and places in California. The slide was used as the reference for creating an acrylic painting duplicating each day of 1970. When all 365 skies are assembled in calendar order vertically, this work is 7 feet high by 52 feet wide, depicting a sky for each day of the year in chronological order. Throughout the early 1970's, he also created many large and small airbrushed sky paintings that were exhibited and collected widely. In 1976, Pecoraro transformed away from airbrushing the sky with the introduction of The Prismatic Light Series, a body of 7 large airbrushed acrylic paintings with vivid colors, shapes and objects, highlighting various light sources from spectrum prisms.
Pecoraro’s work then transformed into 3D constructivist type wall pieces known as The Prismatic Construction Series, where he created 100 works from late 1976 to 1982. He went to Italy in 1983 with the idea of creating the wall constructions in marble. This experience exploded into a fourteen year quest to combine his painting skills with this new exposure to the world of sculpture. From 1984 to the present, Pecoraro has produced many floor, pedestal and wall pieces in marble, bronze, cast stone, copper and glass. He has also been commissioned to create monumental freestanding sculptures, fountains and large wall pieces for corporations, private residences and public places. The issues of architecture, construction and ritual in remembrance of antiquity have a part in the ordering of time and space in his sculptural works. The assemblage of broken and carved edges against the clean-cut of machined edges provided contrast balancing the mass with the fragments, creating a fractured symmetry.
Between 1988 and 1990 Pecoraro then created the Archaeo-Techtonic series of 15 sculptures. This body of work consisted of pieces made of cast stone, cast bronze, marble, brass and Plexiglas. When asked about his art Pecoraro recently stated, "I have always felt the need to express a contemporary and innovative idea using new materials and technologies that were available. Although this was part of a Twentieth -Century progressiveness, I always had a need to sum up the best parts of thousands of years of art making in a "this century" manner. Like some artists, my work needed continuity to the past, my own past and the present as a kind of validation. I guess one could say my work pays homage to the Twentieth-Century at the moment rather than in retrospect."
In 1997 Pecoraro resumed his initial love for painting by beginning a new series titled Branciforte-Construct. The body of work consists of low and high relief textured wall constructions with acrylic paint on wood paneling and mixed media. In conjunction with this is a series of freestanding slate posts with both painted and sand blasted surfaces. Between 2000 and 2001, Pecoraro created the First Encore series of acrylic paintings. This series consists of more than 100 one-foot-square mixed-media paintings on raised wood panels. Pecoraro's inspiration for the series was taken from his love of creating realistic and non-objective art utilizing a variety of technologies and mediums.
Pecoraro has recently entered into the world of digital giclee printing and has released limited-edition prints from the Branciforte-Construct and First Encore painting series. To celebrate the 36th Anniversary of his 365 Skies 1970, Pecoraro has also released an open edition giclee print based on this massive work of art. Please refer to the giclee print section to review all of the available prints.
Pecoraro's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nation-wide and is part of many corporate, private and public art collections. His works are also part of the permanent collections of several museums including Oakland, San Jose and La Jolla in California. Pecoraro is a retired Art Instructor, with twenty-eight years served at De Anza College in Cupertino, CA, where he currently is an Instructor Emeritus. Pecoraro's Studio Campobello is located in the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California where he continues to create paintings and sculptures while displaying his works spanning over 50 years.
