It’s impossible to describe Maine painter Carlo Pittore’s life, art and spirit in just a few sentences. Pittore’s work was too challenging and exuberant, his personality too passionate and cantankerous, for that. But one scene in a new film about his life comes close.
In it, the artist looms above the camera, then waggles his right-hand fingers in front of the lens, eclipsing his face. “These five fingers rule the world,” Pittore pronounces in an authoritative but generous tone, before clasping both hands. “Get them together, and anything is possible.
Everything that’s important in life is made by hand.” It’s an almost-perfect encapsulation of the self-invented artist’s belief in the holy capacity of human-powered creativity. The film, “CARLO.
.. and his Merry Band of Artists,” by documentary filmmaker Richard Kane, premiered in July and is now making the rounds at venues and festivals across the state.
Bolstered by archival footage and recent sit-down interviews, the film centers on the lively conversation between Pittore’s old friends at an outdoor dinner party. Their memories, the film and — most of all — the work Pittore left behind are proof that the artist is still relevant and influential nearly 20 years after his death in 2005, at age 62, from cancer. “I found it fascinating to see how both time and personal experience created vastly different views of who this person, Carlo Pittore, really was,” said Kane.
Born Charles J. Stanley to a Jewish family in New York, Pittore earned his avatar while studying painting in Italy in the 1960s. There, in a small village, local children dubbed him Carlo Pittore, which translates to “Charlie the Painter.
” By the 1970s, Pittore had landed in Bowdoinham, where he flourished both as a painter and as an authentic Maine character and raconteur, drawing a large circle of artistic friends around him. “It gave him an identity he was hungry for,” said Maine artist Pam Smith, a dinner party friend featured in the film. “He got that over there and he brought it here, to cold Maine, and he brought us all together.
” Pittore hosted a weekly life-drawing salon in a converted chicken barn for decades and helped found the still-flourishing Union of Maine Visual Artists . He also advocated and stood up for fellow artists, refusing to pay entry fees for gallery shows. Pittore also had a habit of encouraging young artists — while also asking them to model for him.
“He had so much faith in himself, he could spread it around,” said friend Stephen Petroff in the film, who first met Pittore when he was still a teenager. At Pittore’s memorial ceremony held shortly after he died, Petroff remembered the artist writing to him several times a week, sometimes sending simple messages including “courage” and “courage a plenty.” “That really helped me when I was young,” Petroff said.
A warm and enthusiastic lover of people, garlic and wine, Pittore’s paintings were equally bold. Shying away from lighthouses and lobster boat subjects, he was known in Maine primarily for his huge, oil-painted nudes done in audacious, slashed colors with contrasting bright pink highlights and dark green shadows. Pittore’s nudes weren’t idealized, but they were also never grotesque.
Still, they were direct and uncompromising, just shy of established forms of beauty. They never sold well, and he often struggled to make ends meet. “Half of him always wanted to be successful in a conventional way, and the other half of him knew that was baloney,” said Maine art critic Edgar Allen Beam in the film.
Professor Jonathan D. Katz of the University of Pennsylvania, another voice in the film, put it another way, reckoning Pittore knew what he was doing. “I do think that artists who commit to a dissident road recognize that reward — if it comes — will probably be posthumous, which is not the kind of sacrifice most of us are willing to make,” Katz said.
The bulk of Pittore’s unsold work is now in the hands of the International Artists Manifest , a nonprofit organization based in Woolwich dedicated to underrepresented artists. The Manifest regularly shows and lends Pittore’s work to galleries, keeping his name and paintings in the public eye. “We have just under 1,000 works on stretched canvas,” said Manifest President and Co-Founder Sarah Bouchard.
“Additionally, we have about 60,000 works on paper.” The size of the collection is a testament to Pittore’s years-long dedication to his craft. Even so, at one point in the film, he struggles to put it into words.
“Why do I do art? Why do I draw?” he asks, repeating an interviewer’s questions. Sitting at his kitchen table, Pittore’s answer doesn’t come fast or easy, despite the artistic evidence all around him. He first drags his hands through his hair and rubs his eyes.
Then, with a sudden laugh, it comes to him. “It enhances my existence and my enjoyment of life,” he said. The next screening of “CARLO.
.. and his Merry Band of Artists” is scheduled for Sept.
8 at 7 p.m. at SPACE on Congress Street in Portland.
A panel discussion featuring a group of Pittore’s friends will follow..
