Salvatore Pecoraro’s earliest work — landscapes, watercolors, and increasingly abstract compositions, much of it from his student years — reveals a young artist assembling the visual language that would shape a remarkably varied career. He painted his first oil in 1950, of the family’s Oakland, CA, house, using a set of paints his eighth grade classmates in Chicago had given him when he left. A high school art teacher, Harry Donlevy, redirected his life and helped send him to the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he studied under Richard Diebenkorn alongside a class that included Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, Viola Frey, Robert Bechtle, and Richard McLean. He graduated in 1957 and began teaching art at 21.