Pietro Piccoli

This time we stick with the same theme of European port cities as we did in the last post but in a new vein as we discuss recently introduced artist, Pietro Piccoli. Piccoli has taken a classic theme and popular style of modern impressionist painting and reinvented it with unique broad brushstrokes and palette knife applications that abstract the environment with cubist undertones. Often times he will experiment with the way light dances on the trees in the foreground giving his painting a unique sense of depth and lush amount of color. Please enjoy Picocoli's works on our website, www.hansongalleryfineart.com and read more about him below.


Pietro Piccoli was born in 1954 in the small town of Montopoli di Sabina in central Italy. At a very early age, he became fascinated with the arts and, at the age of sixteen, was enrolled by his parents in Latina's high school for the arts.

Luci e Vele a Bosa Sardegna

By the age of twenty, Piccoli was off to Rome, which in the early 70's was an exciting place for a young artist. It was a hotbed of new ideas and on the cutting edge of the international art scene. Piccoli immediately immersed himself in this new environment, experimenting with new ideas and absorbing the innovative concepts of the many artists whose studios he frequented and to whom he apprenticed himself. Moreover, for a year or so, he traveled in the north of Italy and visited Paris and Zurich.


The 80's comprised a second period of active experimentation in Piccoli's career. He investigated new mediums and sought new ways of weaving together the major strands of his style, realism and abstraction, visual detail and imagination. Variously, he tried impressionism, expressionism, and fauvism. Within ten years, he had found a definite direction toward the synthesis he was seeking. His colors became brighter, his brushwork more free. Soon he began adding patches of pure abstraction as a sort of "out-of -focus" overlay in front of the pure landscape. These patches serve as a visual relief from the strongly geometric architectural forms. In his most recent works, the subject matter has become incorporated into the abstraction.