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"There are many ways of painting with a brush. You can put your brush down parallel to the canvas and it scatters over the paper. The paint rides on the dimple of the paper, its roughness," explains Don Pagano as he adds maroon and yellow to an Italian village landscape.

 "I am not afraid of the paint; I don't dilute the colors with water. I pick up pigment, sometimes, straight from the tube and mix them right on the canvas. I want to show you something. I put some green down and will take my palette knife to make reeds. You see; it's easy.

Don Pagano, 90, paints every day - usually 4 to 5 hours. His interest in drawing bloomed in 6th-grade when his teacher took a special interest in him. He spent hours drawing farm animals, a major theme consistent in much of his work. He took drawing and fine art classes throughout high school and while attending college.

"I took all the art classes that were available. I didn't care about anything else; I just wanted to take art."

"I received most of my education from nationally known artists. If I liked their work I would get their book and take workshops with them all over the world: Mexico, China, Europe, cruises to Alaska. My favorite was the boat down the Danube River stopping at all the capitals along the way."

If he can't paint on location, he takes pictures and then creates the piece pulling it together, first in his mind then on the canvas. The hard part, he says, comes after he gets the details down.

In 1981, he attended a month long workshop in China. He remembers that the Chinese people would crowd around him so densely so as to obstruct the object of his creation. He would have to station himself just so, to keep them away from his line of site.

He went to work for the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway and painted all the time. He traveled with his job and painted in motel rooms or on location. He started having shows in malls where he began selling his work.

He opens an album, a partial history of his work: magazine covers; landscapes with and without farm animals, the tree on his daughter's land under which his wife is buried; arriving at his daughter's house in the snow to deliver firewood; a village in Italy dear to his heart; plein air from the Great Wall and the Forbidden City

Occasionally he does vignettes. He points to "Women Going to Market," depicting three Chinese women in the rain with ponchos and baskets. It was raining and he found shelter under a rock, took pictures and completed the composition at home.

"A vignette is 60 percent paint and 40 percent white. It touches the border in three places with unpainted areas, allowing the viewer to complete the picture."

He flips album pages hundreds of pictures of his lifetime work. There are photos of Venice during the Feast of Saint Anthony; the Bridge of Sighs; Cinque Terre coastline; Lake Como; Verona; Texas Longhorns; bright Southwest scenes; a Carmel mission; snow in Utah; Bryce Canyon; Sedona; the Ahwahnee at Yosemite; old trucks and cars disintegrating in tall grasses. Most of them have been sold or donated to clubs or for fundraisers.

"Since going to China I only paint in watercolors; I got rid of my oil paints. I have to do a lot of planning and give a great deal of thought to create watercolor - so exciting to paint. They are clean and vibrant; things happen, just from the flow of one pigment into another.

"I love to paint, the sense of accomplishment with my own thoughts and knowledge that I am executing something pleasant that people might enjoy. When I die want the brush to fall from my hand."

The Corner Gallery is featuring Don Pagano for the month of April.
