Gregory Perillo Painting "Sundown (Arapaho)"

Gregory Perillo (American, active XX century). "Sundown (Arapaho)" oil on canvas, n.d. Signed at lower right and titled on verso. An oil-on-canvas portrait by Gregory Perillo, titled "Sundown (Arapaho)" on the verso, showing a young girl from the chest up. She looks straight at the viewer with a slow, sly half-smile and eyes narrowed almost shut, as if squinting into low evening light, which may explain the title. Long dark hair falls past her shoulders from a fringe of bangs, and a few loose strands catch the light against a pale, softly mottled ground. Warm sienna and ochre glazes model her face, and a loosely brushed pink shirt adds a note of color at the bottom of the picture. Perillo left the fine canvas weave visible in the background, so the subject's warmth stands out against a deliberately empty field. The work is signed "Perillo" with a copyright symbol at lower right and sits in a burl-veneer frame with an ebonized beaded inner molding. Gregory Perillo was born in Greenwich Village to Italian immigrant parents and grew up on Staten Island from the age of two. His family was so poor during the Depression that his first canvases were paper bags his mother ironed flat, and by his own account his first medium was coffee. He came to know the American West secondhand, through his father, an immigrant who studied the history of his adopted country and passed its legends on to his son. His real art school was the American Museum of Natural History. As a boy he spent hours in its Native American halls and studied the masters of Western painting. The museum's African dioramas have painted backgrounds by William Robinson Leigh, who would later become his teacher. Perillo served in the Navy at the end of the Second World War. Afterward he worked in a garment factory by day, finished his diploma at night, and used the GI Bill to study at the Pratt Institute, the School of Visual Arts, and the Art Students League. His most important lesson came by chance. On a 1950 trip to Arizona, Perillo met Leigh, then in his eighties and one of the last living links to the generation of Remington and Russell. The two grew close, almost like father and son. Perillo studied in Leigh's New York studio until the older painter died in 1955, and he is described as Leigh's only known private pupil. From Leigh he took a lifelong habit of fieldwork: he made repeated trips to Native American communities to sketch, observe, and record the details of dress, horses, and landscape that ground his paintings. Perillo worked in the romantic tradition of the Western masters. He preferred the noble profile, the lone rider, and the galloping mustang herd to strict documentary realism. His work ranged from very small canvases to murals, and from the 1970s he also made sculpture, from small pieces to monumental bronzes. In 1976 he began designing collector plates. The reproductions that followed (plates, figurines, lithographs, and later giclée editions) carried his imagery from gallery walls into china cabinets, which makes original oils like this one the more sought-after part of his output. His public work on Staten Island includes "The Rescue," a September 11 tribute to firefighter Joseph Maffeo at Staten Island University Hospital. He gave generously, supporting New York City public schools, the Boy Scouts of America, the American Parkinson Disease Association, and September 11 charities, following his father's instruction to give back once he succeeded. In 2017 he and his wife, Mary, moved to Clearwater, Florida. He was still painting every day the following year, and he died there in March 2021, survived by Mary, his wife of seventy-three years. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 205970

估價:$300

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