SERIES

Street Games
Cityscapes
Four Seasons
Holiday
Italian Heritage

Anthony P. Sellitto
Painter

Anthony P. Sellitto lives in the same house in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, where he was born (1951) and raised. A self-taught primitivist, Sellitto focuses primarily on depictions of the "old neighborhood". These are street scenes, drawn from memory, that are filled with friends, neighborhood fixtures and the buildings (many now long gone) that formed the fabric and backdrop of his Italian-American heritage and Brooklyn upbringing.

Sellitto first picked up a paintbrush in 1993 when, he says, he received a message from his deceased mother instructing him "to paint!" A dutiful son, Sellitto promptly fulfilled his mother's request.

In 1996, when Sellitto, a union carpenter in New York construction for over 30 years, sustained a career-ending, on-the-job wrist injury, he found that his hobby of painting in oil, on either canvas or linen, was both physically and mentally therapeutic. Suddenly, he was compelled to share his ever-expanding body of work with neighbors, bringing canvases outside his house, on Henry Street, for others to see and comment on. Much to his surprise strangers began offering to buy his paintings and gallery owners and curators began offering him professional encouragement, while using terms he hadn't heard of before, such as "outsider artist," naˆØve artist" and "folk-primitive." Luckily, he didn't take any of these terms personally, and he even got a spot in his first group show at the Frank J. Miele Contemporary Folk Art Gallery on Madison Avenue, NYC.