| Marco Sassone | |
|---|---|
Marco Sassone in his studio. |
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| Birth name | Marco Sassone |
| Born | July 27, 1942 Campi Bisenzio, Italy |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Field | Painter |
| Training | Istituto Galileo Galilei |
| Movement | Expressionism |
| Awards |
Gold medal award from the Italian Academy of Arts, Literature and Science, (1978) |
Marco Sassone, OMRI (born 1942 in Campi Bisenzio) is an Italian painter. He moved to Florence in 1954, where his interest in painting began. He studied architectural drafting at the Istituto Galileo Galilei, and sold his first works, watercolor sketches, to tourists.[1]
Sassone studied with painter Silvio Loffredo, who had been a pupil of the Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka. These artists formed Sassone's early influences.[1]
In November 1967, after the destructive flood that had devastated Florence, Sassone traveled to the United States where he settled in California. He moved to Laguna Beach, where he exhibited at the annual Festival of the Arts.[1]
In the early 1980s Sassone moved his studio to San Francisco, where he encountered homelessness. He spent several years sketching the homeless people he met while observing life on the streets. This work formed the exhibition "Home on the Streets" which opened in 1994, at the Museo ItaloAmericano in San Francisco, and traveled to Los Angeles and Florence, Italy.[1]
In 1982 Marco Sassone was Knighted by president of Italy, Sandro Pertini, into the Order to the Merit of the Italian Republic and received a gold medal award from the Italian Academy of Arts, Literature and Science.[1]
In 2005, Marco Sassone relocated to Toronto, Canada.[2]
Contents |
Early Influences
A childhood encounter with a homeless man in Campi Bisenzio first inspired the artist's lifelong interest in marginalized people and places in society.[3]
As a young man, his personal experience of the destruction of the city of Florence during the flood of 1966 left a lasting impression that can be seen in his work, throughout his forty year career.[3]
On November 23, 1980, an earthquake struck the Irpinia region of Italy, and 500 000 families were made homeless.[4] Marco Sassone quickly organized an auction with Sotheby Park Bernet, "Sassone Earthquake Benefit"[5] to raise funds for the victims made homeless by the earthquake.[6] The artist donated 18 original works which raised $17 000. These funds contributed to the reconstruction of a family farm house destroyed in the Valva region.[5]
In the following years, the artist has organized other auctions of his work, donating the proceeds to charity, including the InterAid organization.[7] In 1984, Sassone's work was auctioned to raise $28 000 to provide medical attention and food to impoverished children.[8]
Sassone's encounter with a homeless man named Willie in San Francisco lead to an exhaustive personal research by the artist.[9] Sassone lived and worked among the homeless of that city, sketching and talking with the people he met.[10] These sketches resulted in the exhibition, Home on the Streets, which consisted of large scale oil paintings and intimate pastel portraits depicting life on the streets. This exhibition has helped to raise awareness and funds for various homeless organizations in the United States.[10] The artist has donated his work to benefit numerous charities, including inter Aid and Another Planet.[11]
"The painter remains a visionary, describing tall buildings and merging highways as he forges a rapport with Toronto. Sassone is profoundly interested in rendering a nearly mythic ambience, whose experience borders on the sublime."[12]
"You'll find yourself wading about in miasmas of pigment applied with such painterly verve and chromatic generosity you catch yourself wanting to eat the stuff with a spoon."[13]
"The substantial core of works selected for the occasion offers a comprehensive, systematic tribute to the work of this painter who has always been attracted to a few specific themes; the internal distress of individuals who see themselves as crushed by life's injustices; and the observation – capricious yet at the same time elegiac – of the Amalfi coast and the Venetian lagoon, both depicted by Sassone with the same feverish anxiety that emerges in the raw truthfulness of his portraits."[14]
"The man with blue eyes stares out at you...His pupils gape at an interior world which he invites you to enter, without knowing. The brush strokes are merciless. As a man and as a painter, Marco Sassone was sucked up into the world of the homeless from the time he was child, at Campi Bisenzio."[15]
Marco Sassone was married in 1972 to Diane Nelson in Florence, Italy,[10] with whom he has one son, Nicola.[18] They divorced in 1983.[10] Sassone was remarried in 2006 to Russian writer Emilia Ianeva, in Toronto.[19]