DESCRIPTION OF WORK

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There are thousands of tales in Joseph Lorusso’s narrative oil paintings. Moody, atmospheric, painterly and evocative, they capture the epiphanies and complex dramas present in the fleeting moment, the shift of a shadow or the quick glance at a peripheral motion. Describing his style as “post-Impressionistic,” Lorusso notes that his influences are the Impressionists and the artists who came afterward, particularly John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler.

A watercolor major at the American Academy of Art in Chicago, Lorusso considers himself self-taught when it comes to oil painting. Though he is best known for his figurative oils on panel, urban scenes, which he renders on canvas, account for about one-third of his creative output. His works range in size from 9 inches by 12 inches to 50 inches by 60 inches, but most typically are 18 inches by 20 inches or 20 inches square. “My subject matter is intimate, and when you take an intimate subject—say, a couple embracing—and you blow it up to 5 feet by 6 feet, you’ll lose some of that intimacy,” he explains.

METHOD OF WORK

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Lorusso mainly paints from photographs of vignettes he sets up at locales around the city. “Oftentimes, the best compositions come when I say, ‘Take five’ and then say, ‘Oh, oh, hold it right there!’ That’s when the models are most natural.” While on site, Lorusso does some quick sketches and color notes. Back in the studio he’ll either work off of one photograph or use several to come up with an original composition. Two days later, the work will be complete. “I do a sepia sketch in paint and block in my value study on the first day,” he says. “The second day is more fun, spontaneous. I just bang it out. If I spend more than two days on a piece, I lose focus.”

FAVORITE SUBJECT MATTER: FIGURATIVE

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Lorusso, a self-described “analytical introvert,” is a big people-watcher whose haunts include airports—“thousands of stories there”—art openings and jazz clubs. He seeks people and situations that evoke a strong emotion. “My love is painting people who have a story to tell,” he says. “Someone at a show once told me that my subjects wear their lives on their faces, and that really fits.” He especially enjoys painting women in an “interesting contemplative narrative setting.” Though Lorusso’s settings have a strong sense of place, they could be anywhere. “People tell me my work is evocative of the 1920s and ’30s, but I don’t want my paintings to be able to be pinned to a certain time period,” he says. However, this fan of ’30’s and ’40’s films does admit that there’s a certain Jazz Age quality to his works: “I don’t know if I’m romanticizing that period, but I have a kind of enchanted memory of what those times were like and can see myself living back then.”

FAVORITE SUBJECT MATTER: URBAN

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“Whenever you look at beautiful old architecture—rundown warehouses and buildings that at one time had people bustling inside—they have stories to tell,” he says. “They are haunted structures, and I wonder what was happening in them 50 years ago.”

FIRST ARTISTIC INSPIRATIONS

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“I remember we had this landscape—it’s still so vivid in my memory—of a waterfall scene that my father painted,” Lorusso says. “It was always there, over the couch. My parents emigrated from Italy in the 1950s, and as a young man my father painted interiors—scenes, murals, scrolls.  When he came to the States, he had to change professions but continued to paint.” Lorusso’s family returned to Italy often during his childhood; his first trip was at age 6. “In Europe, art is part of the language. It gets into your fiber,” he says. When he entered high school, Lorusso’s art teachers encouraged him to visit the American Academy of Art in Chicago on the weekends to draw from live models. “I was only 15. That was a huge head start.”

MOST INFLUENTIAL ARTISTS

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“The Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago was right across the street from the school, and at lunch time I would go over and wander the halls,” Lorusso says. “That was my church—it moved me, inspired me. That’s where I started learning about the great oil painters that became my inspirations: Sargent, Sorolla, Whistler and Velázquez.”

BIGGEST BREAK

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While at the Art Institute of Chicago, Lorusso was recruited as an illustrator by Hallmark Cards Inc. in Kansas City. He worked there for a decade before becoming a self-employed artist five years ago. “That set the wheels in motion,” he says. “If I hadn’t left Chicago and come here, I don’t know if I’d necessarily do what I’m doing today.”

ARTISTIC PHILOSOPHY

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“You won’t find pages and pages written about the meaning of my work,” says Lorusso, who encourages the viewer to become the essential third party. “I just give the viewer a trigger to
complete the work himself.”