A Life of Art

Paul Baldassini was the Grand Prize Winner in International Artist magazine’s Challenge No. 150 Florals & Gardens.

Paul Baldassini has been an artist for more than 50 years. While he began with drawing and sketching, his passion for art gradually shifted toward watercolor and oil painting, as well as a variety of other forms of media from graphic arts to photography.

Daffodils & Red Tulips, oil on panel, 24 x 36 in.“My work has evolved over roughly four 12-year cycles. Each cycle informed the subsequent one, leading to new insights and revelations about the things that matter to me most about the creation of—history, composition, color, materials and technique,” he says. Trips to art museums across the United States and Europe in the 1980s were especially formative experiences for the artist and his approach to both watercolor and oil painting.

Little Climbing Beauties No. 3, oil on mounted linen panel, 24 ½ x 31 ½ in."My professional years significantly broadened my understanding in many of the techniques and tools I continue to rely and improve upon in the creation of my art. One example was working with professional creative directors and photographers where I gained an understanding of the professional use of cameras, photography and lighting effects for advertising, which I now use to create compelling compositions as source materials. Another was my morning sketching at a local café, which inspired the brushstrokes and marks I used to create my Café watercolors. Those marks have in turn morphed into the process I use to create my floral and landscape works in oil,” he reflects.

Rhododendron Blossoms, oil on mounted portrait linen panel, 24 ¼ x 31¾ in.

All Good Things, oil on panel, 24 x 36 in.In the 1990s, Baldassini returned to oil painting, creating his series of Old Master-inspired large-format works. He moved to Connecticut with his family in 2004, where he soon began a series of oil paintings that included farms, fields and tractors in landscape settings. In 2012, he began a series of complex large-format realistic floral works in the style of the Flemish Old Masters, which continues to evolve to this day.

The Asymmetry of Nature, oil on panel, 24 x 36 in.“Since September 2023 I have been working on a series of experimental ‘invented’ landscapes,” he says. These oil paintings are based on both observation and memory, and completed in a single session. “These works proceed quite differently from the floral works, the former being a much more labor intensive structured approach using a full spectral palette of colors and a variety of brushes, the latter being a more ‘see what happens’ approach using only five colors, large inexpensive hardware store brushes, rags, paper towels and my fingers,” says Baldassini. “Both offer up their own challenges and solutions to create compelling compositions.”