Carmelo Sortino is a bold and innovative painter living in Vancouver, Canada. Born in Sicily in 1939, he approaches his art-making with vigour and passion. As a young boy, he worked alongside his uncle in the family pastry shop, molding and painting the luscious shapes and colours of marzipan fruit, a Sicilian specialty. This childhood occupation without doubt laid the basic foundation for his future career as an artist. In his late teens, Sortino moved to Milan and enrolled as a pastry chef in a prestigious culinary school. His love and skill in the culinary arts developed alongside a keen interest in colour, composition and the visual arts.
After he arrived in North America in the early 1970s, Sortino owned and operated a number of successful pastry shops and restaurants. He slowly but surely began to appreciate the strong connections between his two great passions, food and art. His overwhelming desire to paint eventually moved him on to a new and exciting path as an artist.
As in the case of many artists, Sortino's "hobby" became a way of life and then a full-time career. His paintings now hang in corporate and private collections in Canada, the United States and Asia. Sortino's striking work includes still life paintings with brilliantly-coloured fruit, flags and Italian plates — some with images taken from European masters like Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne and Modigliani — as well as new landscapes and recent conceptual paintings. A limited number of giclée prints of his paintings are also available.
"I have used fruit as a metaphor of sensuality in much the same way that Morandi used his bottles and jars, or Cezanne his beloved Mont-Ste-Victoire. All are inexhaustible subject matter. Each piece of fruit is unique in shape and colour, and that is what I seek to portray in my paintings: the individual nuances and personalities. Recently I am painting landscapes with the same enthusiasm. I strive to make each work a unique visual and sensory experience".
