House-Painter Painter

Vermont House Painter Patsy (for Pasquale) Santo exhibited his first canvas in 1938 in hopes of getting a free ticket to the Rutland State Fair. He did not get the ticket, but his landscape, painted in oils from the local drugstore, won the art competition at the fair. Patsy bought himself some more paints and brushes and has been painting ever since.

Last week seven of Santo's oils were hanging in a Manhattan show of "Contemporary American Natural Painters " His pictures of Vermont hills and quiet snowy village streets are accurate in perspective and detail, subdued in color. But for all his near-professional realism, Santo still retains his fondness for simple storytelling subjects, e.g., Sunday Morning a woman and child walking up a snowy street toward a white steepled church or Sugaring, a farmer and his sledge in late-winter maple woods. "Maybe I do it a little different than other people," says Santo. "When I do a landscape, I start with the sky and the mountains and I leave the foreground for the last. I like to get the far objects into it just as much as the near." The results are often closer to the slick naturalism of Luigi Lucioni than to the guileless sincerity of primitives like Grandma Moses.

Since Vermont's housepainting season is a short one, Santo finds plenty of time for his art. "All summer I paint houses to earn a living. All winter I hibernate and paint pictures to please myself. If I sell more pictures, I paint less houses." Santo manages to finish 12 to 15 canvases a year and has sold paintings to half a dozen museums, including Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney.

Last week, with Vermont's snows just beginning to shrink, Santo was busy in his backyard studio finishing a picture of Bennington's Baptist Church. In another month, he will exchange his canvases and palette for buckets and ladder. His big ambition is to sell enough pictures to be able to give up house painting for good.

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