Painting His Story

Writing by Emma Richman

Photography by Justin Negard

Gazing upon the colorful shapes of his cutout canvas paintings on display at the Casa das Artes in Tavira, Portugal, Vincent Baldassano was transported back in time. Suddenly it was 1972, and he was brushing acrylic paint on that very canvas in his Lagos studio. The paintings had been missing for over 40 years, and he thought they’d been lost forever. But in 2015 they were returned to their maker.

“Each one of these paintings is a part of the artistic journey,” he says. “The missing paintings fit into a little slot of it, and now there’s a whole new chapter.”

A former South Salem resident who now lives in Connecticut, Baldassano describes himself as an expressionist painter. His career has taken him across the country and around the world, making memories and friendships that transcend time and distance. But before he was an accomplished artist, he was just a kid from Staten Island who never imagined he would become a painter.

The start

Born and raised on Staten Island, Baldassano started painting during his senior year at Wagner College. He began as a pre-med biology student with an art minor, but he soon switched his major to art, imagining a career as a medical illustrator or an art historian—definitely not a professional painter. This was the 1960s, and Baldassano says most parents weren’t eager for their sons to be artists.

Upon graduation, Baldassano was ready to spread his wings. Staten Island could feel limiting at times, he says. Wagner College was so close that he walked to school.

“I was president of my class and an athlete,” he says. “People knew me with these different labels, but none of them knew that I was really interested in art.”

In his quest to get away, Baldassano literally threw a dart at a map. The first one landed on Hawaii—too far. The next one landed on Oregon. So it was decided: Baldassano, at 20, would move across the country to earn his MFA at the University of Oregon. Out west, he found clarity.

“You have to sometimes go away to find yourself,” he says. “One day I was stretching a canvas, getting ready to paint a still life, and I just saw myself. I saw that this was something I was going to be doing for the rest of my life.”

The journey

It was traveling across the country from Staten Island to Oregon that started Baldassano on his path to becoming a painter. Today, the images and experiences of travel still inspire his paintings. Everywhere Baldassano goes, he brings a sketchbook. They’re prized possessions to him, containing pages of his drawings, notes and collages.

After graduating from Oregon, Baldassano got a job teaching at Niagara County Community College in Niagara Falls. But just as he was settling into his life as a working artist, tragedy struck.

In May 1972, Baldassano’s studio in Buffalo was destroyed in a gas fire—or, as he puts it more casually, “my studio blew up.” By sheer luck, Baldassano was not there that day, but almost all of his work was destroyed, including his sketchbooks.

The loss was immense, but Baldassano took the opportunity to start over. He was granted a sabbatical, so he packed his things and moved to Portugal, settling in Lagos, a fishing village, where he stayed for a year.

During his year abroad, Baldassano continued to paint and travel, finding inspiration in the fish market and sea creatures in Lagos. The organisms, along with his background in biology, inspired the biomorphic shapes of his cutout paintings.

To create the cutouts, Baldassano first paints on a rectangular canvas. Then, he cuts the painting, freeing the organic shape from the confines of the rectangle. He says this method adds visual movement and changes the way you look at the work.

In Lagos, Baldassano grew close with two Portuguese artists, Joaquim Bravo and Alvaro Lapa. The trio exchanged knowledge and helped each other grow as artists.

“We would go to each other’s studios, and even though I couldn’t speak the language, we communicated through the art,” he says. “Artists can speak this other language through visual imagery.”

When Baldassano returned to teach at Niagara in September 1973, he left his work on consignment at a gallery in Portugal, preparing to return for a show. But that show never happened.

The Carnation Revolution, a military coup to overthrow the authoritarian government in Lisbon, broke out in April 1973. Amid the political upheaval, the gallery disappeared, along with Baldassano’s paintings.

The Manhattan Breakfast Club

Baldassano moved to New York City in 1975 and began painting in a studio on Broome Street in SoHo. In a quest to create a community of fellow artists, he became a founding member of the Manhattan Breakfast Club.

This “club” met every morning at a little Greek restaurant on Lafayette Street. They ordered the early bird special: $1.25 for eggs, bacon and coffee. While the breakfast was cheap, it was the community that kept them coming back.

“It formed organically,” Baldassano says. “Everybody would sit next to each other, and you got to meet the person next to you. It turned out to be a bunch of artists, actors and musicians.”

Painting in the studio can be a lonely and introverted experience, Baldassano says. So the breakfast club became an important space where he and other artists could support each other and get thoughtful feedback on their work.

While living in New York City, Baldassano met his wife Carole. After their children Alexandre and Francesca were born, they moved to South Salem in 1984. 

The idea of fostering connection among artists stuck with Baldassano as he ventured upstate and opened the Station Gallery in 1990.

The Manhattan Breakfast Club lived on throughout the decades. Even after Baldassano had moved out of the city, he continued to meet the group once a week for many years.

The balancing act

Up in Westchester, there was never a dull moment for Baldassano, as he balanced being a painter, gallery owner and businessman.

Baldassano fondly remembers his first show at the Station Gallery; it featured the work of renowned Katonah-based artist Ed Giobbi. The two quickly formed a connection through the gallery and the Katonah Breakfast Club, which they formed around the same time at the Baker’s Cafe across from the train station.

As a gallery owner, Baldassano enjoyed meeting artists he admired and celebrating influential creatives. His favorite show featured works by faculty members and students at Black Mountain College, an influential college in North Carolina active from 1933 to 1957. Baldassano also paid tribute to the Manhattan Breakfast Club with a 1993 exhibit of artists in the group.

Of all the shows he had, Baldassano never exhibited his own work. Those were two worlds he liked to keep separate.

As if running an art gallery while working on his own paintings weren’t enough, Baldassano also ran ArtPak Transport, an artwork shipping company, out of the back of the gallery. 

In 1994, Baldassano closed the Station Gallery, and he sold ArtPak around the same time. He went on to serve as director of the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts in Mount Kisco for a year and later served as gallery director of Silvermine Art Galleries for five years. 

The return

In 1990, Baldassano returned to Portugal to reunite with Bravo and Lapa. On their drive to Lagos, they stopped in a city called Evora. Baldassano and Bravo took a long walk, admiring the early medieval architecture and fortress encasing the city. The conversation was intense, he says.

The walk was so profound that when Baldassano returned home to South Salem, he made a tile mural and a painting entitled “Walk with Bravo.” He says the piece remains very important to him. Just a few weeks later, he learned Bravo had died of prostate cancer.

“The weird thing was,” he says, “I did this painting, and I found out later that Bravo did a painting of our friendship, and Lapa did a painting of our friendship.”

Even when they were apart, their friendship was “on another level,” Baldassano says. And so, losing that collection work from their year together felt like losing a piece of their history.

Baldassano looked for the paintings over the years, but in vain. He believed they were lost for good until he received a fateful call in 2015.

The call was from David Evans, the former gallery director where Baldassano’s work was held. After 43 years, he had found the missing paintings. They were rolled up in the corner of the former gallery owner’s husband’s studio in Portugal.

Baldassano was invited to have a show in Tavira. In 2016, he displayed his lost art and other paintings alongside works from Bravo and Lapa, who died in 2006. For Baldassano, the show was a reminder of how their close relationship influenced their art.

Baldassano donated “Walk with Bravo” to the National Museum of Friar Manuel do Cenáculo in Evora in memory of his friends.

The professor

Throughout the time Baldasanno owned a gallery and shipping company in Katonah, he continued to teach. He taught painting at colleges, universities and professional art schools throughout the U.S., and Baldassano says he particularly loves teaching at community colleges because they’re open to everyone and give people a good start.

Since retiring, Baldassano has donated his artwork to community colleges throughout the tristate area and beyond. He’s also helped expand their art collections, including the one at Housatonic Community College, which has one of the largest art collections of any community college in the U.S.

The other reason Baldassano enjoys teaching is that it gives him time to travel, which is one of his greatest sources of inspiration.

“I just try to make myself like a sponge and then see what happens, what comes out the other end,” he says.

Baldassano has traveled the world, but he keeps returning to Italy and Portugal. In the mid-2000s, he went to Rome to learn ancient techniques like fresco painting and egg tempera. He later spent five summers in the 2010s as a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome.

Everywhere he travels, Baldassano records the imagery, culture and experiences in his sketchbooks. However, he says his sketches don’t necessarily inspire his larger works; rather, he uses the images and memories in his mind.

“All my work comes from my imagination,” he says. “But my imagination is refueled by my travels and the visual experiences that I have.”

The painter

Though he wears many hats, Baldassano is first and foremost a painter.

On any given morning, you might find Baldassano brushing acrylic paint on a six-foot tall arched canvas in his home studio. Jazz music fills the barn, each tempo change and chord progression informing his next move.

“I put my work together pretty much like a jazz musician plays,” he says. “It’s intuitive, and one color, one shade, plays off the other.”

Baldassano describes his paintings today as “abstract expressionism with a figurative element to it.” Like jazz, his art doesn’t fit in one box or follow a certain set of rules. He says he approaches each painting differently.

Sometimes, Baldassano may start a painting from a sketch and work with charcoal. Another time, he might start with a brush and sketch with oil paint on the canvas. He may even simply put a swatch of color down and see where it leads him.

“I don’t work from a finished sketch because, for me, the exploration in painting is very important,” he explains. “That’s a journey, and you never finish. You might reach a certain climax in one painting, then it takes you to the next painting.”

This constant exploration is evident in his style, which has changed often over the years, from abstract painting to figure drawing to a combination of both.

Baldassano often works on multiple paintings at once. He’ll start on a large painting and then create some small ones. He primarily works with acrylic and oil paints, but he always likes to try new methods and materials.

Over the course of his career, Baldassano has received multiple CAPS Grants for painting and SUNY Painting Fellowships. His work is on display in numerous private and public collections, including the Housatonic Museum of Art, Westchester Community College and the Savannah College of Art & Design. He’s done over 50 solo shows and over 100 group exhibitions, nationally and internationally.

The connector

When Baldassano and his wife moved to Oxford, CT, in 2003, his passion for community came with him. He returned to teaching full-time at Gateway Community College in New Haven and taught there until he retired in 2022.

At Gateway, Baldassano was the art club advisor. The group’s Facebook page, which is now called the New Haven Art Club, remains active with over 300 members. It’s open to anyone, and Baldassano welcomes artists and art lovers alike. For him, bringing people together just comes naturally.

“I really enjoy discovering other people,” he says. “I feel like I’m a catalyst.”

Inspired by his breakfast clubs, Baldassano recently began a new lunch group, which he’s currently calling “The Group.” It’s a ragtag bunch of local “artists,” that includes photographers, painters, chefs, martial artists, writers, musicians and more. But everyone has something interesting to bring to the table, and Baldassano wants to have the conversation.

Baldassano’s work will be on display at Chroma Fine Art Gallery in Katonah from September 21 to October 13. The show will include some of his new works from 2024, inspired by the Gothic arches of Central Europe, which he visited in December 2023.

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This article was published in the September/October 2024 edition of Connect to Northern Westchester.