An artist looks back, with love, on his lifetime passion

Making art has been my lifetime passion. It started when I was a boy, sitting for hours at the kitchen table, copying the comic strips of the day. It progressed to making pencil sketches of Hollywood celebrities and drawing pictures with colored chalk on asphalt pavements. My schoolbook covers were filled with drawings. I just couldn't stop.

Some families might have seen this as a thing to encourage, but not mine. My immigrant parents were struggling through the Great Depression years of the 1930s and took no notice of this budding talent.

Even so, going to an art school never came up. Still, untrained though I was, I created artwork for school projects and later, when I was in the service, I had some cartoons printed in an Army newspaper. The dream of being an artist followed me wherever I went.

In time, I got married and started to raise a family. Now settled into a home life, my art became even more important to me. While learning how to paint, I also began submitting cartoons to a bunch of trade magazines. I didn't make The New Yorker or The Saturday Evening Post, but I did manage to assemble a scrapbook full of published cartoons.

I knew early on that it was the work of the 19th century American landscape artists that most moved me, so the Metropolitan Museum of Art became my school, and the paintings there became my teachers.

I found those paintings that I most admired, and I pored over them, inch by inch, for hours on end. I studied the brushstrokes and the textures; under-paintings and over-paintings. I made copious notes and sketches. And then I rushed home to see if I could apply everything that I had just learned to the painting I was working on.

Bit by tiny bit, I gradually became the artist I wanted to be.

In 1974, we moved from Astoria to Long Island, where I found a painter's paradise. The wide, tree-lined avenues; the nearby beaches with their grassy dunes; the boats, the parks and the big skies — they all became inspirations for a procession of images.

As I took my morning and evening walks, I studied how shadows fell and sunlight glanced off attic windows. All these things found their way into paintings.

At first, I couldn't bring myself to sell any of my paintings. Each one felt like a diary entry — a moment in time I wanted to hold on to. But I came to realize that I'd soon run out of space if I kept them all, so I reluctantly began to let go.

Most of my sales came through galleries, which made the buyers anonymous to me. Only rarely did a buyer make an effort to track me down, to share a thought or a feeling.

Once, a New York City schoolteacher wrote to me to say that she worked in a tough Brooklyn neighborhood and on arriving home every day, she would sit down in front of her painting with a cup of hot tea and slowly unwind.

Those few words were worth far more to me than the money I was paid.

I never counted how many of my paintings are out there, hanging on people's walls and lost to me forever. I think of them often and how I would love to see them again. Fortunately, I have four children who have their walls covered with my work, and every time I visit I'm able to take the grand tour once again and do some reminiscing.

Frank Salerno,
Oceanside

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