The 1960s mark the emergence of a distinctive and increasingly experimental voice. Rejected from the painting program at San Francisco State, Salvatore Pecoraro was offered a place in printmaking instead and took his master’s degree there in 1965 — a detour that gave him the technique behind his first breakthrough. Unable to blend fast-drying acrylic smoothly enough to model a face, he borrowed a printmaker’s trick and spattered fine gradations of paint with a toothbrush, producing the startling figures of the Pinole series. Awards and his first solo exhibition followed in 1967. That same year, a critic mistakenly described his surfaces as airbrushed; Pecoraro, who had never used one, bought an airbrush and never went back. The decade closes with the first of his Sky Paintings.