Neon signs and towering skies—Bruce Cascia paints both. The road is what connects these two starkly contrasting images in the artist’s mind. As a boy in the 1960s, road trips from the family home in Central Illinois took him past seemingly endless agricultural fields crowned by an even more endless sky. His paintings are as much skyscapes as they are landscapes.
“I remember watching these thunderheads come rolling over the corn fields and being amazed at how impressive and dramatic they were,” Cascia recalls. “The sky was always looming and the landscape was flat.”
Katrina Howarth, Periwinkle Chapel Lane, oil on canvas, 16 x20"
Cascia grew up before factory farms pushed out family farmers, when the fields and sky were punctuated by farmhouses. Before attempting to paint them, he used the family camera to photograph them. Even as a youngster, he could recognize the drama inherent in the scene.
“I would look and think, ‘wow, that’s a great composition.’ In my head I would register the details of the graphics of the little lone farmhouse and the big, huge sky, and it was indicative of people in general standing against all odds and being survivors where the weather is most dramatic,” Cascia remembers of the agrarian landscape on the eastern edge of Tornado Alley. “It was amazing to me that these farmhouses were still standing out in the middle of nowhere where it was flat with nothing to buffer them.”
Bruce Cascia, Saints & Sinners, oil on canvas, 20 x 20"
As for the neon works, they grew out of a long-ago series Cascia devoted to hot dog carts upon moving to Chicago, where he began his professional career as a graphic designer and then as an advertising art director. Chicago is also the starting point for Route 66 and Cascia would travel the Mother Road, taking photographs, until he eventually made his way to Arizona. The neon hotel signs captivated him. The paintings they inspired possess an unintentional Pulp Fiction feel—nostalgic, but also foreboding. They are cinematic with a real Bad Times at the El Royale film noir undercurrent.
In that way, too, the neon paintings relate to his “Flatlands” landscapes in that they feel ideally suited as movie backdrops—isolated, desolate, the calm before the storm, highlighting humanity’s insignificance in the face of nature’s massive forces.
Bruce Cascia, Looming Thunderhead, oil on canvas, 40 x 30"
You can’t help filling in the space around Cascia’s paintings with story. The people who are never pictured in his scenes, but who you know are there. The family farmer trying to hang on one more season. The hustler about to be double-crossed by his partner and stuffed in the trunk of a Lincoln.
Katrina Howarth, Primrose Sky, oil on canvas, 16 x 20"
Cascia is joined by Katrina Howarth as the featured artists at Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art in September. Howarth’s cheerful, welcoming, less-representational landscapes are the perfect counterpoint to Cascia’s darker, more weathered and nearly photorealistic “Flatlands” and neons with their apprehension, allowing collectors to choose for themselves which side of their nature they wish to satisfy.
“In the paintings of Bruce Cascia and Katrina Howarth, we find a harmonious blend of tradition and innovation,” Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art owner Deborah Fritz said. “Memories of home blend with the allure of distant lands and the work transports us to a world where art and emotion intertwine.” —
Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art 702 Canyon Road • Santa Fe, NM 87501 • (505) 986-1156 www.giacobbefritz.com
Powered by Froala Editor
