Dino Paravano

Featured Editorial

For 72-year old Dino Paravano, art is his life – and has been for as long as he can remember. “It’s who I am,” he says, and for him, his life as an artist is far more than just a career. “What am I going to do otherwise? I want to paint,” he says. “If I couldn’t make a living at it, I would be painting evenings and weekends for my own enjoyment.”

And it has kept him young. “I’m young at heart, a young, old man,” he says, and then realizes, “Gee, I’ve never called myself that before.”

For Paravano, life has always been about painting – and more painting. When he owned a gallery in South Africa in the ‘70s, Dino would easily get bored and would do “sketch after sketch of still life compositions and then move on to sketching people walking by. I walk around with eyes wide open, looking at things with color and composition in mind, along with searching for something new. I’m drawn to paint anything that catches my eye.”

His eye catches a lot. “I’ve had a lot of write-ups through the years,” he says. “If you read them, they’ll all say how I appeal to everyone because I paint so many subjects. I’ll do wildlife, then walk into my garden, see some pretty flowers, pick them out, bring them to my studio and paint them.”

Upon finishing a regular morning workout, Dino spends the rest of the day painting in his Tuscon home studio until sunset. After living in South Africa for 44 years, en route from his native Italy, he finally moved to the states in 1992 and chose Arizona as his residence. “I like it here because it’s warm and sunny; the climate reminds me of South Africa.”

Being around the sun is important to him. “I don’t paint gloomy,” Dino says. “I like to paint cheerful paintings, full of sunlight. There’s enough misery around the world without me adding to it in my paintings.” Such is his philosophy regarding his approach to each blank canvas.

Because of a skin problem made worse when exposed to too much sun, Dino had a large window installed in his studio, which provides ample natural light that dominates his work without forcing him to be outside for extended periods of time.

The heightened contrast between light and shadow is what intrigues him most in the mountainous region he calls home. “Most of my paintings are set in late afternoon or early morning. In the middle of the day, the light is flat, but at 5 o’ clock, the mountains become beautiful as the 3-D effect produced by the contrasting light and shadows really comes out.”

In addition to color, composition is also very important, but Dino concedes, “I enjoy starting a painting better than finishing it. I enjoy composing and creating, not altogether sure how it will turn out. Only after years of experience do you feel confident of the outcome. But after I’ve been working for a while, I eventually know how it’s going to turn out and then it’s a question of technique – in other words, it’s got to look like me and not anyone else.”

Though Dino likes a lot of artists’ work, he doesn’t view any of them as influences, per se, but more as sources of inspiration, for which he is grateful. “I’ve been to lots of art museums and galleries around the world, and I can’t believe what I see,” he says. “I’m inspired by all this amazing artwork and can’t wait to go and do it myself, to paint one, not like that, but hopefully as good,” he says.

His first source of inspiration was an artist he knew well - his father. “He was an amateur painter who didn’t make a living at it, but I always admired and enjoyed looking at his paintings as far back as I can remember. Seeing them made me want to paint, too.”

His father’s influence surely played a part in Dino’s natural interest in the arts at such a young age. “When I was a little kid, at Christmas, there was only one thing I wanted, graphite. At school I would sketch things around me, including my schoolmates in between lessons.”

Knowing how keen his son was on art, Dino’s father tried to limit how much time he spent doing it out of fear the boy’s obsession would affect his schoolwork. But an accident happened that helped change his father’s outlook.

Dino was helping his dad paint on a contracted job when the scaffolding they stood on gave way, causing father and son to fall to the ground. Dino landed on his father’s ankle, and the injury kept him out of work for sometime, taking the family’s income away.

During this challenging time, Dino started using oils, and even though he was only 13, he sold most every painting he did, which helped put food on the table.

It became obvious that Dino should go to art school, so he enrolled at a college in Johannesburg where he kept working hard and developed his talent.

Fast-forward to today, and he has had 14 one-man and hundreds of group exhibitions around the world, many of them in museums, and “each time there are at least one, two or three new subjects that I’ve never painted before.”

Though he really enjoyed living in South Africa, Dino wishes he had come to the United States 20 years earlier because “This is the art world, and it would’ve been better for my career if I was here.” But he encourages other aspiring artists by saying, “It doesn’t matter where you are, if you have talent and develop your ability.”

Though the current art market is a competitive one, Dino feels artists of today have certain advantages he didn’t have when starting out. “When I started doing pastels, no one knew anything about pastels,” he says. “Starting out, there was only plein-air painting for me; I had no camera. Now, more reference material is easier to come by through books as well as developments in technology. Compared to when I was starting out, it’s now a piece of cake to get information.” Dino believes “immense learning can come simply from looking at professional work in books and at gallery and museum shows.”

Dino believes that, while it’s OK to get references from pictures in books and trips to the zoo, none of these sources can take the place of journeying into the world of the animal’s natural habitat, where stories are waiting to be told. “At the zoo, the animal walks up and down in the same spot, and you miss the influence of their natural behavior and habitat,” he says.

In South Africa Dino visited game reserves for a week or two at a time once or twice per year and his exposure to the alluring wild was also helped when the South African National Parks Board commissioned him to do 10 paintings depicting all the South African national parks.

He has seen many exciting things but patience is definitely a virtue -  “I’ll spend the whole day waiting. You can’t provoke the animals to make a move. You have to be very patient.

“Once we found a leopard lying near a sizeable tree. Looking up, we saw a dead buck on a branch. We waited a while for the leopard to make a move. It climbed up the tree for its breakfast. While eating, a hyena arrived at the base of the tree. Later, the leopard wanted to come down, but couldn’t due to the threatening hyena below. The leopard bit off the buck’s head and dropped it to the hyena, who picked it up and ran off, providing the leopard a safe pathway back to the ground.”

Being around such liveliness, regular in nature yet pretty much foreign to the civilized world, coincides well with Dino’s overall artistic approach where “portraits aren’t my thing. I like to paint figures and animals doing something interesting or exciting.”

Dino has been a professional since 1966, but has been an artist since birth and will always remain one.

By Nick David