Armondo Dellasanta was born in 1916 on Clinton Street in Binghamton, New York. His parents had emigrated from Pisaro, in Northern Italy. His father worked at the Fairbanks Foundry while his mother raised Armondo and his four sisters. The family spoke Italian at home. Clinton Street was then the thriving commercial center of an ethnically diverse neighborhood. The experience of growing up in this atmosphere may have sparked Dellasanta's interest in bustling street scenes.

As a child, Armondo liked to draw. He says, "We didn't have much;... there was no art supply store, there weren't any kind of stores where you could buy pads and paper, pencils and stuff like that, but I think I had crayon, and I used to draw pictures. And I think most of the stuff that I drew had to do with the season of the year, like for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving." As a youth, he was apprenticed to a barber. He later worked in a printing plant as a linotype operator, running the printing presses and setting type on a keyboard with 90 keys. He also did forestry work with the Civilian Conservation Corps in the Arnot Forest near Elmira, New York.

In 1940, Dellasanta enlisted in the army in response to a call for volunteers from President Franklin D. Roosevelt. By then, he had begun collecting art books, and had bought his first set of paints. While stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey for basic training in 1941, he visited New York City and began photo graphing its streets and buildings. He also visited Manhattan's numerous art galleries and museums, studying the works of more recognized artists. He continued these trips throughout the 1950s and 60s.

Dellasanta enthusiastically explored New York's neighborhoods. The sketches and black and white photographs that he made on these excursions later served as references for his paintings. His New York views form a virtual walking tour of Manhattan, portraying landmarks and scenes from Wall Street and City Hall in lower Manhattan through Washington Square, Balducci's Produce and Avignone Pharmacy in Greenwich Village, The Waldorf Cafeteria in midtown, Central Park, and Columbus Circle, to La Goulue on the upper East Side.

Dellasanta's attraction to New York City and to images like the Statue of Liberty and Columbus Circle may reflect his family's Italian immigrant experience. Many Europeans who came through New York City around the turn of the century were drawn by job opportunities to settle in Binghamton, then undergoing a major industrial expansion with employers like the Endicott-Johnson Shoe Company and International Time Recording Company, forerunner of IBM.

During the war, Dellasanta spent a week guarding the railroad buildings and equipment in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, which inspired a lifelong interest in this subject. While stationed in Germany and in France, where he earned a Bronze Star, he made a series of striking, closely observed pencil sketches of buildings and scenery, life in the army camps, and his fellow soldiers. On his return he made colorful, imaginative oil sketches of French scenery.

Back in Binghamton after the war, he continued to collect art books. He was attracted by the work of members of the Ashcan School, including Robert Henri and John Sloan, who painted scenes of every day American urban life in the first decades of the 20th century. He also admired the French and American Impressionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Claude Monet, Maurice Utrillo, Childe Hassam, and Ernest Lawson, who captured effects of color, light, and atmosphere with broad, broken brushstrokes. He early formed the goal that he "didn't want to produce work that looked like every one else's." He began to paint in earnest, drawing on the photo graphs he had taken, and continuing to photograph scenes that interested him in Binghamton, Susquehanna, New York City, and elsewhere. He continued to visit New York City and to study art in museums and in the windows of art galleries. He rarely went into the galleries, perhaps feeling himself apart from the New York art world.

After the war, Dellasanta worked as an inspector in an automobile parts plant. When his employer went bankrupt in 1961, he decided to take a year off to paint full-time. He painted in the mornings and explored the city in the afternoons with his camera, looking for subjects to paint. He created a substantial body of work. The following year he took a job doing custom framing, which he continued for the next 30 years.

Dellasanta has painted villages, cities, and landscapes throughout New York State and northern Pennsylvania. His paintings preserve an earlier era in the places he painted, which is fundamental to their appeal. He painted Binghamton before Urban Renewal, and Susquehanna in its heyday as a transportation hub. His New York scenes show many famous landmarks, some of which are no longer extant, as well as buildings and street scenes that simply appealed to him. He has an extraordinary ability to discern and bring out the picturesque qualities in scenes such as Avignone Pharmacy with its brilliant red awning, or City Hall with its yellow taxis in the foreground. His works are highly atmospheric, bathing the scenes in a specific color of light, such as the blue of a winter twilight in Central Park, or the grays of a stormy day in Columbus Circle. This quality carries strong emotional associations of the experience of place. As John Apgar has pointed out, "His vignettes recall treasured memories, such as eating at a sidewalk cafe, walking in Central Park, being with the bustling crowds at Grand Central Station, feeling the breezes on the waterfront or watching chess games at Washington Square." He uses his black and white photographs as a reference to get the details of the buildings right. Then he "dreams up" the people and traffic that enliven the scene, using any colors he chooses. His style has evolved, always with the goal of remaining distinctive, and a vehicle for his vision. Early in his career he discovered the technique of painting with a palette knife instead of a brush, and im mediately found that it gave him the freedom and spontaneity he was looking for. This technique produces thick impastos, or buildup of paint. Recently he has adopted the use of a pencil point, rather than the palette knife, for drawing in details and lettering.

While working as a framer, he began experimenting with a drypoint etching technique utilizing scrap pieces of plexiglas left over from framing. He had a book on American printmakers, and was fascinated by the etchings of Reginald Marsh and others. He developed his own drypoint technique, and has created hundreds of marvelously detailed and atmospheric etchings. Some are of the same subjects as his paintings; some are more intimate and narrative in content. In a way these drypoints, which demand meticulousness and preci sion, are the antithesis of his paint ings, with their free and loose technique, although they share with the paintings a lively, kinetic quality, produced here through linear means. Dellasanta showed his work regularly in annual outdoor art shows in Binghamton and Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. His work began to be collected and appreciated. He exhibited at Gil Williams' Book Loft on Court Street, Binghamton, which enhanced his reputation with col lectors. Today he exhibits at the Avenue Art Gallery in Endicott, and he had a one-man show of his etchings at Barnes & Noble in 2001. In 1998 he began working with Louise K. Burke as his agent. She has helped to bring his work to wider public attention, and to place it in numerous public, private, and corporate collections.

He won first prize at the Dorflinger Glass Museum Wildflower Art Festival, White Mills, Pennsylvania, in 1998 for one of his views of the Starrucca Viaduct; another is in the collection of the Pennsylvania Railroad Museum in Strasburg. He has exhibited at the National Academy of Design, New York City, at Munson-Williams-Proctor Art In stitute, Utica, New York, Roberson Museum, Binghamton, New York, and now in this major exhibition at the Italian American Museum in New York City. His work is represented in the Broome County Public Library, Broome Community College, and Roberson Museum collections.

While Dellasanta's work is becoming more widely known, he remains modest and maintains his independence of viewpoint and style. Perseverance and belief in his talent have enabled him to produce an important body of work chronicling the pictorial histories of his beloved Manhattan, his hometown of Binghamton, New York, and Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. These nostalgic recollections constitute a life's work that is still unfolding in his quest to pass on his living experiences to others through his art. He says: "I don't have any thing profound to say about art. I'm a self-taught painter and . . . all I do is paint, and that's it." Collectors and admirers of his work hope that he continues to do just that. I would like to thank John Apgar, Art Consultant, and Roberson Museum and Science Center for permission to use material from its exhibition catalogue, Armondo Dellasanta: Favorite Places, 2003. I would like to acknowledge Louise K. Burke's carefully researched and compiled historical notes on Dellasanta's paintings.

Carol Gordon Wood is Consulting Curator of Art at Roberson Museum and Science Center, Binghamton, New York. She has worked as Curator of Decorative Arts at Munson-Williams- Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, New York.