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Jay Maggio Born: New Roads, Lousiana EDUCATION
Northwood University, Cedar Hill, TX Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA Catholic High School of Pointe Coupee, New Roads, LA My intrigue with trees dates back to my childhood
and how I used to love to perch in a beautiful mimosa tree in our front yard and watch the world go by. In south Louisiana, where I grew up and spent half of my life I admired the majestic big oaks and tall pecan trees that were prevalent throughout this part of the country. Attending school in Dallas in the early eighties what I missed most were the lush trees and mama’s gumbo. After college I moved back to Louisiana only to find that I missed the big blue sky and warm friendly people in North Texas just as much. In 1990 I moved to Dallas where I have planted myself and now fondly call Dallas my home. As they often say here, “I got here as quick as I could”. As a result of my migration back and forth from Louisiana to Texas it’s easy to say that my paintings represent a marriage of my past and my present life. A blend of the big trees of south Louisiana and the big blue-sky and wide-open prairies of north Texas. My technique is accomplished by taking photo’s of trees that I find interesting and painting them as realistic as I possibly can with great effort to closely match nature’s color or to greatly exaggerate it. To create the texture and sparkle sometimes evident in my paintings I take a great deal of time to mix the oil colors with linseed oil but paint thiner is never used in my application. Paint brushes with thin long hairs are trimmed to the point where sometimes only a handful of hairs remain. Once the paint is mixed to a consistency where the thickness of the paint is a fair bit thicker than motor oil but not quite as thick as pudding I then accumulate a fair amount of paint on the tip of the brushes in order to apply it to the canvas and get the pointillist and textured effect. This technique is very time consuming. An average size paintings such as a 16” x 20” canvas could take as much as 80 hours to produce. Larger paintings can take up to five or six weeks. My career as an artist started fifteen years ago. I have since elaborated my style to incorporate monotone, two-tone, and tritone color combinations in addition to the more traditional blue-sky paintings. The DeGraphi style, an acronym I coined from the words “detail” and “graphic” was started about fourteen years ago. I traditionally would only create a couple of these very time-consuming paintings a year. Since demand has increase I am moving more in this direction which allows even more creativity with this style of painting. If I were to use all the descriptions to sum up my style it would be “hyper-real neoimpressionist surreal pointillism”. (Haha!) It’s not important how one describes my paintings but it is my hope that the viewer feels drawn into my work with a sense of solitude and happiness. It is my desire that my paintings bring you splendor. ~ Jay Maggio
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