When Pacifico Palumbo — “Tony” to his friends and family — was a kid growing up in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, he lived above a bread store. Every morning, his father, a longshoreman, would get up at 5:30 a.m., go downstairs and buy a fresh loaf of bread, come back up and make a sandwich to take out to the docks. On Sundays, the entire extended family of uncles and aunts, cousins and grandparents would load chests of ice and food and drinks into their cars and drive out to Long Island for picnics and games of bocce, an Italian form of lawn bowling.
“They brought everything but the kitchen sink,” Palumbo says with a smile.
Palumbo, the Colrain artist known to many as the adventurous restaurateur who, along with his husband, chef Michael Collins, brought hot dogs to Greenfield’s Main St., gourmet food and pizza to Colrain, and Mexican food to Shelburne Falls, has immortalized these and many other moments from his childhood with a series of paintings that capture the vibrant life of his large Italian family. Each painting is accompanied by a written anecdote that fleshes out the memory behind each scene and conveys Palumbo’s fond enthusiasm for the people and places he depicts.
“An Italian Story,” on exhibit through the end of April at The Greenfield Gallery, 231 Main St., features a selection of some of the 40 or so paintings Palumbo has completed in a body of work that shows no sign of abating. The Greenfield show offers a unique chance to see the work locally before it moves on to other venues. Curators at the Italian American Museum and the American Folk Art Museum, both in New York City, have expressed interest, Palumbo says.
As he’s painting, Palumbo works from a trove of mostly black and white snapshots, as well as portraits he’s asked family members to sit for over the years, but he never feels bound by them. In a process that seems similar to the work of writing fiction, Palumbo often finds that he needs to invent or recompose in order to get at the truth.
For one large painting, “Bocce,” Palumbo worked very closely from a photograph taken in 1939 of his father, some of his uncles, and their friends playing bocce. Palumbo says he found the photo in the drawer of his father’s nightstand after he died. The composition in the original photo, and the poses of the eight men in their summer whites were so striking that Palumbo didn’t alter them at all. Yet, when he finished the painting, both he and Collins felt something was missing. Collins was the one who thought of it.
“I said, ‘You need the bocce ball,’” Collins recalls.
In the original photo, the ball must have moved out of the frame. Palumbo painted one in, making it red and giving it a sense of blurred movement that brought the scene to life.
With other paintings, Palumbo has taken even more liberties. For instance, for a painting he’s still working on in his Colrain studio, Palumbo wanted to show himself with his younger brother in front of the bread store he’d been telling me about.
“But I was never smart enough to think of taking pictures at that age,” Palumbo says with a chuckle. And that bakery is no longer in existence. So, Palumbo went online and found photographs of another iconic New York bakery to stand in for the one he remembered.
Similarly, Palumbo says, “I remember going all the time to Coney Island. I remember the Wonder Wheel and the different rides we had, like the parachute. … but nobody took pictures of me as a little kid, say, in front of the parachute.”
Palumbo remedied that, creating “Coney Island,” a painting that shows his brother and him standing on the boardwalk in front of the rides. In a way that feels wonderful and time-defying, Palumbo is retroactively creating the photographs nobody thought to take.
The Coney Island painting has sold, as well as one Palumbo painted in which he placed himself, his father and his brother in front of the iconic Nathan’s Famous hot dog restaurant with hot dogs in their hands. But The Greenfield Gallery is offering full-sized giclée reproductions of these, and all of the paintings, on canvas.
Palumbo says he began painting at 3 years old, when one of his uncles gave him a set of oil paints for Christmas. He studied painting at Brooklyn Community College for Art and then Pratt Institute but put aside his brushes when he was 27 to pursue a career in advertising. He worked in the field during its creative heyday in the 1960s and into the early ’70s, working on the iconic “I (heart) NY” campaign, among others. When advertising became driven more by focus groups than individual creativity, Palumbo left the field and started creating neon sculptures. He and Collins ran a neon gallery in New York City for 12 years before moving permanently to the Colrain home they had bought as a getaway in 1969.
It was at Greenfield Community College, in Budge Hyde’s class, that Palumbo took up painting again after a long hiatus.
“I was shaking — you wouldn’t believe it — the first day I had to go paint,” Palumbo says. “I got all these kids in my class and I’m like this …” He raises his hand and makes it tremble in mid-air.
“I couldn’t even get the brush to the canvas, that’s how nervous I was.”
The rest, as they say, is history. In Palumbo’s case, a history heavily laced with the food, love and friendship of his Italian roots.
Where to see it
The Greenfield Gallery, 231 Main St., Greenfield. Contact: 413-772-9334 or find the gallery on Facebook for hours and other information.
Find more of Palumbo’s paintings from the series, “An Italian Story,” at: www.anitalianstory.com
And see more of his artwork at: www.pacificopalumbofineart.com