Bob Cairone - Fine artist

Biography

I have been passionate about art since adolescence. As a young child I was passionate about chess - these are among my earliest memories. Then I became passionate about reading and science. My path to art started at 13. Living in the dense urban metrolopis of New York City, my parents sent me to catholic grade school and then catholic high school. Much to my consternation, an all male, catholic high school. Freshman year, everyone had to take an art class. We had a student intern teacher for the fledgling art program, a young woman who was only four years older than we were.  At first I didn't take the class very seriously. However, her love of art was contagious, and she recognized and nurtured an inclination I didn't know I was showing. My first painting, to reflect my interest in Roman history, was a copy of a bust of Julius Caesar in basalt, as shown in Will Durant's epic Story of Civilization.  It came out halfway decently. Shortly after that, a friend of my mother's gave me a nice set of oil paints, and I was allowed to take over a room in the attic as my very own studio.  Man, was it hot up there! But that summer, I began to paint in earnest. Later, I took group painting lessons with Marge Colavito, a local artist in Jersey City.

I also started collecting art at that time, to a small degree. In an age when most teenage boys hungs posters of Farrah Fawcett on their walls, I covered mine with lithographs by Robert Kipness and engravings by Salvador Dali.

Not being very athletic, I spent my time between my schoolwork, my interest in science, and my art. Science became my academic focus and then my profession, and then raising a family was the priority. Painting became an avocation that I persued sometimes energetically and sometimes intermittantly. For a while in the early 1990's, I made a serious effort with some success in establishing myself in the Long Island, NY art scene. At the same time, unfortunately, the economy of Long Island took several catastrophic losses, and the bottom fell out of my day job along with forty thousand other engineers. This forced my relocation to the Midwest, followed by several of life's challenges. Art became a less dominant priority.

I had discovered colored pencils after reading a book by Bet Borgeson, and found them quite suitable for my circumstances.  They are very convenient, requiring no set up or clean up effort, and no dedicated studio space either. After taking a workshop with her, colored pencils became my medium of choice for a time. And one can produce paintings with colored pencils - they are not necessarilly called drawings.

As for my writing, I have always been a big reader, for as long as I can remember. As a child, I would read under the covers in bed with a flashlight. My parents were supportive of my reading habit, and would take me to the library frequently. They would allow me to buy books pretty much whenever I wanted. I was soon surrounded by books, many of them art books. The idea of writing to me was natural, and is something I've always done, from as early as I can remember. ...!?... Currently, I have a few idea I'd like to develop, like a comedy about a curious incident in Catholic church history called The Cadaver Synod, another on the tragedy of Giordano Bruno, and a play about a chess tournament held in 1924.

Eventually, the twilight of my professional computer engineering career dovetailed with my rededication to art. I am now fully, in body and soul, an artist. Though I consider myself laregly self taught as a painter, so many people have influenced me as an artist, from other artists living and historic, to family and friends, teachers, and writers, and so on. And I hope my art continues to grow and mature as I continue to grow and develop as a person and as an artist in the broader sense.