Pinole

Figures lifted from black-and-white magazine photography sit beside hard-edge geometry, rainbows, and banks of cloud — the clouds themselves drawn from a spring in 1966 when some form of precipitation fell nearly every day for 46 days. The series forms surfaces again and again in the earliest paintings. Circa 1967, his close friend and painter John Kalamaras told him to abandon organic forms — “You’re Italian, Mediterranean, geometric” — and to increase his use of earth tones. Both pieces of advice held for the next forty years. The series takes its name from Pinole, California, where Pecoraro was living at the time.