Joe Decamillis

Joe DeCamillis-artist, poet, writer-has created book inspired art since 2003. He studied creative writing at UCLA in the 1980’s before discovering a gift for telling stories with paint & brush. His work has landed in many important private & corporate collections and garnered over 70 awards at premier art fairs including 23 Best of Show and 20 Best of Media. During 20 years as a visual artist, his subject matter and style changed slowly but dramatically–from loose bright paintings on board to dramatic scenes of everyday America painted like Dutch Masters on copper and steel. He pushed the extremes of scale until 2002 when he painted smaller than postage stamp size. Joe states, “The audience had to get close to see what was going on. There was intimacy. People slowed down to notice details. They read my stories, they studied my visual poems.” His new book arts series owes much to his poetry studies at UCLA. Like poems, his artworks use elements of structure, style, mechanics, and content to build layers of meaning. The elements consist of a painted image, an old book, book title, found and created text, and found objects. Each one can carry multiple meanings. Joe states, “I ruminate my life experiences and personal observations of culture, society, and history while I begin handling one of the elements. I work others in until they all unite as a complete work of art.”