Good art gets the viewer to stop and look at it.
Great art invites the viewer to see a scene or an object or a person the way the artist sees it.
Munson, Pa., artist Benjamin Saggese has some fine pieces showing at the Mount Nittany Medical Center for the next couple of months. You can see his work in the hallway outside the cafeteria.
Saggese started painting at age 15 and hasn’t really stopped since. He also started showing professionally while still in his teens.
“I try to paint for everyone,” Saggese says.
His work certainly has an eclectic feel to it. He favors old abandoned churches, floral compositions and rural scenes, all done in acrylic. One scene might draw the viewer into the ruins of an empty chapel, while the next features a garden or a flower sale. His style redefines itself to suit the subject.
“I do love Van Gogh as well as Georgia O’Keefe,” he says.
Saggese has a background as colorful as his canvases. He traveled through Mexico during the ‘80s and had a successful exhibit in Taxco, Mexico in 1981. His work has shown in the Southern Alleghenies Museum, St. Vincent’s College, the Acapulco Convention Center and the Taxco Gallery.
He studied commercial art at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, but, he says, “I never took a painting class.”
He has, however, taught painting. Most notably, he spent about five years teaching art classes to inmates at the State Correctional Institution in Houtzdale.
“Once they saw they could do it, they were encouraged to paint more,” he says “and in all that time, I never heard a curse word. And I never felt afraid.”
Saggese has to have oxygen these days. He says he used to do shows constantly, but now he has a hard time carrying the pieces (which he does frame himself). And he paints non-stop.
“I do everything trying to search for something deeper,” Saggese says,” I hope when people look at my work, they try to look deeper and see something differently.”
Saggese has spent time in the hospital himself, and hopes that the paintings he has there will improve spirits.
“I like to exhibit in hospitals,” he says, “because people visiting their family or their friends say that they like to come and look at the paintings. They find them comforting.”
Saggese says he never wants to quit painting, and he will literally paint all day, getting up at six in the morning and painting until well after noon.
“I wouldn’t want to do anything else,” he concludes.
