Thomas J. LoPresti
He painted at night in a basement in Tuckahoe, New York, and came upstairs with the canvas still wet. By day he was a clerk at Metropolitan Life. In between, for sixty years, he drew on everything he could reach.
Born on the Lower East Side in 1910 to parents from Misilmeri, Sicily. Pratt Institute at night, 1934. Blue ribbon, Crestwood, 1964. Died December 1973, the day after his sixty-third birthday. His grandson keeps the studio open.
Sixteen sketchbooks, 1961–1973
He carried a book everywhere — Montauk, Cape Cod, Bar Harbor, Ogunquit, the Bronx River at Crestwood station. Pick a year.
A few pages
Oils
Forty-two small canvases: harbors, sunsets over Ogunquit, a Siamese cat, and a wall of portraits of women with impossible hair.
Doodles
Four hundred drawings on scrap paper — ducks, boats, faces, and things that are hard to name.
The papers
Show notices, prize ribbons, a Pratt tuition ticket, letters from galleries, and the biography he typed about himself in 1965.