Joe DeCamillis

During 17 years as visual artist, my subject matter and style changed slowly but dramatically–from loose bright paintings on board to dramatic scenes of everyday America painted like Dutch Masters on copper and steel. I pushed the extremes of scale until 2002 when I painted smaller than postage stamps. The audience had to get close to see what was going on. There was intimacy. People slowed down to notice details. They read my stories, they studied my visual poems. My new works owe much to my poetry studies at UCLA. Like poems, they use elements of structure, style, mechanics, and content to build layers of meaning. The elements consist of a painted image, an old book, book title, found and created text, and found objects. Each one can carry multiple meanings. I ruminate my life experiences and personal observations of culture, society, and history while I begin handling one of the elements. I work the others in until they all unite as a complete work of art. Old books and other found objects give me a direct physical connection to the subject matter I study in my work—especially considering the way I usually discover them in my travels and wanderings. I love the treasure hunt—the quest for interesting things on the side of the road or discarded along a footpath—be it concrete sidewalk, dirt trail, or the strewn banks of a body of water. I also seek in flea markets, junk shops, and thrift stores, but my favorite hunts happen on roadsides.Weathered artifacts give me a tangible link to my past experiences, my heritage, and the roads we’ve come down as a society. Perhaps we feel the pull to touch things in museums because the physical sensation of touch helps us to better experience our own connections to the relics of our culture and our history. It links us to our place in whatever part of the world the museum has captured. I know that working with found objects enhances my ability to create this personal connection during the creative process in ways that just painting or sketching onto a flat plane cannot.