By NANCY HILER
"I want my work to reflect the time in which we live," the W.C. Mepham graduate said, adding that oil is at the center of the world today.
An oil change
In 2005, the idea of painting with used motor oil came to him when he went to his car mechanic for an oil change and noticed three discarded containers of it. "At the time, there was some chatter about oil in a political context as the price of crude oil was starting to rise," Macaluso said.
Living then in North Bellmore, where he grew up, Macaluso took the used engine oil home with him and began to experiment with it. "The specific medium influenced the process," he explained. He tried applying it on canvas, but it was absorbed. Ultimately, he chose to paint on thick watercolor paper. He added pigment to it, and the colors deepened. "The colors end up kind of dirty," Macaluso said. "A sort of a halo is created around the line. Overall, it has a brown feel, a golden brown."
Beside affecting the colors, at times the use of the oil affected Macaluso's choice of subject matter. "I began focusing on the idea of oil itself," he said. Since most of his paintings are centered around today's social and political climate, oil itself has come to be a symbol in many of his images, particularly the issue of worldwide dependence on crude oil.
He became fascinated with the idea that oil, as an organic substance, formed after hundreds of millions of years, is extracted from the earth and then is used every day in car engines, both "supporting and possibly threatening" our lives. "Human civilization, in all its parts, has been built upon a foundation of oil," Macaluso says, "but today that foundation's unsustainable. Locally and globally, we are scrambling to erect safeguards in the form of alternative energy."
"The used motor oil became a representation of this present time in my work," Macaluso said. "It symbolizes how oil affects every aspect of life today." In some of his abstract paintings, for example, he drew numbers representing crude oil prices and orbs representing the sun as an alternative power source. At the same time, it matters to him that reusing motor oil is a form of recycling, since the environment is another global issue that concerns him.
Writing about his art
Macaluso defies the stereotype of the isolated artist, out of touch with the larger world. "My work is very introspective, but I look at the world. I find inspiration in books, the news, going online, just being conscious, not living in a bubble," he said. "I think of my work as collecting."
Also atypical of an artist, he writes about his artistic process, as well as about the meaning or messages he is trying to convey in his works. His Web site, www.davidmacaluso.com, is filled with nearly as much of his writing as photographs of his artwork.
"To let the work speak for itself would be my preference," he recounted, "but when work is abstract, I felt people would like to be guided so it has meaning. I felt the need to include a written summary about the work for anyone who is interested."
For example, he writes, "In works on paper or canvas, I alternately utilize a variety of media ranging from used motor oil (which gets recycled into visual art), to collage to traditional oil paint and more. These works generally incorporate influences from a variety of sources: from the world at hand to the world in photographs; social concerns to biological structures to numbers; from any seemingly disparate force that impresses upon an individual, to what we as individuals exert and pour forth into the collective mix."
Talent apparent early
Macaluso now lives and works as a full-time artist in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, but was born and raised in North Bellmore. "I sort of consider myself self-taught," he said. Macaluso's grandfather and mother had obvious artistic gifts, so he feels he inherited much of his talent from them, but says it was later reinforced in school. He attended Saw Mill Road Elementary School, and then Jerusalem Avenue Junior High School for a one year and Grand Avenue Middle School a second year. He graduated from W.C. Mepham High School in 1991, and was the recipient of the Cultural Arts Council Award.
"School exposed me to the materials, to working methods," he says of his years in high school. "At Mepham, I remember the art sector instructors being very serious artists when I was there. It was my first exposure to working artists."
After high school, Macaluso attended Parsons School of Design, the New School and Hunter College. "In college, I had the desire to pursue the visual arts full-time, but I did have some [financial] reservations." During and after college, he worked with his grandfather in the family-owned bakery, "La Margarita," then located on Bedford Avenue in Bellmore Village. "I was painting, but mostly accepting commissions to do family portraits, some conceptual work," he said. It was when his grandfather retired and closed shop in 2005 that Macaluso chose to work as an artist full-time.
"Regardless of the odds, I'm pursuing it," he said. "It is the thing that was speaking to me most, a persistent voice, a calling. It is something I needed to do, and hopefully the career will be the result."
In the short three years since then, Macaluso has created additional commissioned work, much of it in private collections around the world, as well as dozens of paintings, many sold as part of limited edition prints, including as two series.
Many of his individual paintings have timely, worldly titles such as "Price Ripples," or the even more literal "Oil Futures Surged Yesterday to a New High," a quote from a New York Times article repeated in the painting. Another is called "War is the Truest Form of Divination" after a quote from Southern Gothic novelist Cormac McCarthy's book, "Blood Meridian", which is scrolled along the top of the painting and juxtaposed against a quote from Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
Mindsnapper, Obama
This year, Macaluso produced two special series of paintings. The first, called the "Mindsnapper" series, is a group of high-intensity abstracts focusing on the human organism in relation to universal symbols of the sun and illumination. The works have titles such as "Sol, Amen" and "Prototype." About this series, the artist says, "Mindsnapper reaches toward the prospect of an emerging civilization-mode rooted in this universal perception, one largely powered by light-based energy."
"My current work is centered around the political spectrum," Macaluso says of his portrait series, "Barack Obama: Made in Motor Oil," a play on the phrase, Made in America. Macaluso has released a new painting about once a week since late August, and will continue to do so until the election in November.
About the series, the artist writes, "Now is a time of transition. And a transition is also perceived to be occurring in the U.S. political arena. In the minds of many, the presidential bid of Barack Obama has become symbolic of transition on a number of fronts."
Macaluso has exhibited his paintings in various Manhattan galleries, including the Artist Space in SoHo, the Paula Barr Gallery and Art Gotham, both in Chelsea, and Gallerie Icosahedron in TriBeCa. A member of the Brooklyn Arts Council, he is affiliated with the Agora Contemporary Art Gallery in Chelsea. His work also has been featured in online galleries Artscene, Saatchi Gallery Online and Myartspace.
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