This has been a year, a time of reflection for me... in my life and in my art. It has been almost comforting to me to look back in time, through years, decades of work I have produced and look at the different styles that evolved and reflected my experiences at the time I created them.
The triptych above is titled “The Still and The Lifeless”, created in 1994. I designed the shapes, cut the wood with a power jigsaw, painted the panels in oil paint, then put them all together with carefully selected copper hinges to match the tones of the art. In college I was an Art History major which didn’t really get me anywhere with just a Bachelor’s degree (that’s another story for another time), but my art was strongly influenced by centuries of art I learned about in college and pored through in books I had since I was eleven. The work of the Northern Renaissance artists intrigued me. I love triptychs.
This period in the 1990’s was a rough one for me. Every six months someone close to me passed away. That, along with facing my own health issues made it a decade when turning to my art to express darkness was really crucial. An “edge” emerged in my art I hadn’t quite seen before and I heartily embraced it as it was my boat through turbulent waters.
I remember seeing a call for art for a juried still life exhibition at the Islip Art Museum. I was already creating sculptural works in wood and oil paint and had the idea for this triptych. My art is hard to define and I never know what to say when people ask me what kind of art I do. One thing I definitely don’t do is fit in to more conventional “safe” work that many enjoy seeing and that many enjoy creating and that many prefer to include in exhibitions, especially here in suburbia. When I see an open call for art with a theme that speaks to me, I often get inspired to do something completely new and enter it to see if it gets in. That is what I did with this. I wanted to enter the juried still life show, but I wanted to do it on my terms, in my style, with my own voice. So here it is… “The Still and The Lifeless”. There is the obligatory table with a vase of flowers on it and on the front of the two panels (when the doors are closed), I painted an apple on one side and a pear on the other, since typical still life paintings often depict pieces of fruit. But what about the bodies in the drapery and that axe lodged up there? Yeah, I know.
“The Still and The Lifeless” was selected for the show at the Islip Art Museum in 1994 and it was featured prominently in the hallway of the museum. It even received a nice mention in a newspaper review of the show. That’s always a thrill for an artist, to have their work mentioned. God, we’re such whores sometimes, grappling at the smallest crumbs. I didn’t choose to be an artist. It just happened.
Most of the paintings I did during that decade had an edge because I was in deep pain and I needed to express it. I’m not Mapplethorpe, but for Long Island I may as well be for the issues I’ve had showing this phase of my work that addresses grief, loss, death, and illness. When I had an issue in Manhasset in 1992 (just Google Bellospirito vs. Manhasset if you don’t already know about it), my mother was dying of cancer. I remember when I visited her in the hospital one day after work, I mentioned to her what was happening and that I had people helping me sort it out, but she didn’t live long enough to see what happened. Honestly, I thought I’d be able to reason with the library and that a court case could be avoided. That was my hope, anyway. Two-and-a-half-years later, I won a case in Federal Court that set a precedent in the Eastern District of New York and is now being cited around the country in similar cases and is also being taught in law schools. But at the time, it was so hard. People liked seeing me in person after they had seen me on television and in the papers, but when it came time for artists to stand up for their own work and cite my case so that they could have the same freedom of speech in their art as well, most stayed quiet (they told me so). Whores, as I said. Artists do anything for a show, even keeping their mouths shut at the expense of freedom of expression.
It’s now almost thirty years later and I have a solo exhibition coming up in late January 2023 and I’m going to include “The Still and The Lifeless” in the show. It’s been wrapped up in storage for too long and the young, vibrant, creative artists and tattoo artists who own The Gallery @ in Huntington, NY are willing to have me bring my edges out to display. They are familiar with this territory, tattoos having their own history of being taboo, and their goal is to bring fine art into the tattoo studio / art studio to merge the mediums. That’s cool and I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to show my art there. The Opening Reception is slated for Sunday, January 22nd at 3pm and the inner, younger me still very much alive and well in me will be more than happy to attend (along with the older me) so that my edge can come out of the closet and be seen and celebrated. Finally.
