'I still have to paint that last picture.' Sal Del Deo on his 75 years in Provincetown

PROVINCETOWN ― Walking into Salvatore Del Deo’s studio, canvases of all sizes fill every inch of the room. Sal, who sits in front of an easel wearing a paint-covered smock, greets me with a smile.

At 95, Sal is as dedicated to his craft as ever. Across from my chair, his painting of the day — a small still life of a vase of dead flowers painted in hues of red, purple and blue — reflects where his art is at now: he claims he’s just now learned how to paint.

“I think I'm painting better than I ever have,” he said. “At least I like to think. It's my own personal self-appraisal. I'm doing what I want to do. Not that I ever was dictated to do something else … Now I don't give a damn and I just do what I want to do."

"Salvatore Del Deo: 75 years in Provincetown" will remain open until Nov. 26 at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum at 460 Commercial St.

Sal has become one of Provincetown's greats in his 75 years of residence. Through his art, he’s captured the changing social landscape of what was once a Portuguese fishing town.

“I always thought ‘Oh, he's got this whole gorgeous landscape why does he always paint the radar domes?’ (But) to him, they're people and animate beings in the landscape,” Romolo Del Deo, Sal’s son, said, describing a revelation he had about his father’s work. “That's also the way he treats the lighthouses and the (boats). A lot of the things, I realized, that he paints are actually for him semi-animate .… He personifies everything so even his paintings that aren’t of people are people.”

Provincetown found Sal in a serendipitous way. When he was around nine, his brother, Silvestro, came home from a weekend away with artist Edgar Corbridge, gushing about the wonders of the seaside town.

“He said, ‘Sally, I went to a town today, right on the water with the fishing boats,'” Sal recalled. “‘They bring them up on the shore and they scrape the barnacles off the boat, the hull, and they paint them. Then all of a sudden there’s a bunch all around them painting pictures of them doing their work on the boat. It's so beautiful like Europe.’ And he said ‘Someday you're gonna go there.’”

Sal wouldn’t see it for himself until he was 17.

As a student at the Vesper George School of Art in Boston, famed Cape Cod painter Henry Hensche taught a painting demonstration for his class ― a day that would change Sal’s life.

Sal’s face lit up as he explained how in four hours, Hensche somehow made a portrait of his friend and classmate, Marjorie Rita (Osborne) Whorf, with six blobs of paint and no beforehand sketches.

Following the demonstration, Sal leapt up onto the stage to ask Hensche if he had a school. Hensche said he did, in a place called Provincetown on Cape Cod, and to find him if he was serious about studying with him.

That winter, Sal and his friend Charles Couper piled into Couper’s 1930 Studebaker Commander and drove for six hours from Providence, Rhode Island to Provincetown.

“He talked from 12 noon to 12 midnight,” Sal said, of Hensche. “He never gave us a cup of coffee … a glass of water. Nothing. He just talked about painting and socialism.”

The Cape Cod School of Art would be Sal’s home for the following three summers where he would learn from Hensche about his way of painting, largely influenced by Charles W. Hawthorne. From there, he would leave town for New York and the Arts Students League only to return and set down roots in the seaside town soon after.

In the years that followed, the town has seen him run two successful restaurants, launch the Fine Arts Work Center with fellow artists in 1968, assist his wife, Josephine, in her work creating the Cape Cod National Seashore, and build and almost lose his dune shack ― among almost a lifetime of other things.

But above all, Sal was and still is the painter of Provincetown.

Sal Del Deo’s 75 years in Provincetown

In light of his milestone, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum debuted “Salvatore Del Deo: 75 Years in Provincetown” curated by Executive Director Christine McCarthy for her 2023 director’s choice show.

“This was probably one of the most complex curation projects for me because there was so much work,” she said.

Over a year and a half of visits to Sal’s studio, McCarthy worked to create a show that displayed their commonalities as she likes to make her director’s choice shows personal to her.

“Sal and I, we have a lot in common,” she said. “I love to go clamming. I'm on the shellfish commission in Provincetown … and I'm Italian despite my last name. … So there's definitely shared experiences that I wanted to convey through this exhibition.”

When all was said and done, McCarthy created a show displaying snapshots of Sal’s Provincetown throughout the years.

“It's almost like his work is just visionary,” she said. “It's not just painting a picture …. recording a place or a person, it's taking it to the next level because they're so personal. I think it was really trying to convey the personal connections that Sal had to not just the landscape, but to the people and parts of Provincetown.”

When it came time for Sal to see it, McCarthy said the pair shared a moment in the gallery, admiring the work he had created and she had curated.

“I was standing next to him and he looked at me — he calls me Christina — and he said, ‘Christina, I can't believe I made all this work,’” she recalled. “I said, ‘You did and you made a lot more than this.’ He was visually moved by the exhibition and the pairings … I felt like I was so successful in my curation because it moved him in a way that he hadn't been moved about his work before.”

Sitting with Sal, I asked him about the exhibition. He said McCarthy did a wonderful job but he'd like to see a show of the conceptual works he's producing now before he goes.

"That and Speranza and the Patricia Marie painting, a big six by six ... and the one I'm working on now," he said. "I'd like to see those shown."

The "that" in question is a larger-than-life painting of St. Anthony of Thebes sitting on a back wall of Sal's studio.

Inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” Sal began painting the piece in his forties, only to finish last year as part of his New Year’s resolution. St. Anthony, a slightly gruesome green-hued man, sits center surrounded by biblical and personal figures.

“Instead of the three graces, there’s only two and one of them has a butterfly on its butt,” he said. “That's my answer to today's craze for tattoos. On the opposite side, there's a young lady with a flower in her hand. That's my wife and she's looking at the man next to her…A victim of the pandemic. He's got a mask on, he's more dead than alive. That's another statement about today.”

As for what’s next, Sal plans to keep painting, saying that his best is yet to come.

“I still have to paint that last picture,” he said. “I'm very optimistic. I think that my best days are ahead of me if I could stay well. Homemade wine. Moderation. That's the key.”

Frankie Rowley covers entertainment and things to do. Contact her at frowley@capecodonline.com.

Thanks to our subscribers, who help make this coverage possible. If you are not a subscriber, please consider supporting quality local journalism with a Cape Cod Times subscription. Here are our subscription plans.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: A talk with artist Provincetown Salvadore Del Deo: 75 years painting