1st Encore

In December 2000, Salvatore Pecoraro decided to mark the true start of the millennium by doing it all again: 365 paintings, one for every day of 2001, twelve inches square on mahogany door skin, edges painted so they would need no frame. The first used a photograph he took at Steamer Lane at 7:15 on the morning of January 1.

By the end of May he had about a hundred, and admitted the obvious — a man with a ten-thousand-square-foot barn and nine acres to look after was not going to finish 365 of anything. So he stopped counting days and kept painting: reworking what he had, adding sixty more pieces to the collection.

What they hold is a lifetime of technique arriving all at once. Every method he had taught his students turns up somewhere in them, including one he had been refining since 1968 — floating six to eight coats of acrylic medium over a printed image, soaking the paper away in hot water, and lifting off a transparent decal of pure ink. Freed from the calendar, the 1st Encore became something better than a diary: a demonstration of everything he knew, at the scale of a book in your hands.