IMAGE VAULT ARTIST
STEVEN SACATOS WWW.IMAGEVAULT.CO.NZ
INTRODUCTION At Image Vault we want to celebrate our artists. New Zealand has a wonderful community of amazing artists. This e book series celebrates their lives and their talents. STEVEN SACATOS A Mt Albert based artist Steve Sacatos has been painting for the past 30 years, here in NZ and overseas. His colourful, detailed paintings celebrate inner city Auckland and small-town New Zealand with a style that is at once complex yet approachable. Mixing Auckland's volcanoes, Edwardian villas and sub-tropical fauna - they have a quick/slow effect - graphically immediate, yet also allowing for that long, loving look. You'll see something new every time.
STEVEN SACATOS As an artist I paint pretty much every day. It is my job and it is what I do. The best advice I was given was, 'when you paint don't think about art'. WHAT ART DO YOU MOST IDENTIFY WITH? I've always been very strongly drawn to graphic artists - and by that I mean anybody with a strong line, clear tone and colour. So I've always loved the great Flemish painters: Bosch, Breughel, and van der Weyden. The power of line has always been a great mover in the visual arts. I don't think we'll ever equal the sheer technical brilliance of the painters of the 1500s, but in its different guises, graphic art it is still the work I enjoy the most. I am also attracted to humour, and satire in art. Starting from Hogarth, all the way down to George Grosz, Ronald Searle and even our very own David Low. All heroes of mine, and again - the main driver to their work was almost always line, rather than atmospherics, or even colour. I'd also like to name check as heroes or influences the Pre-Raphaelites, Alma Tadema, Norman Rockwell, and folk/naive art.
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STEVEN SACATOS
WHAT WAS YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING MOMENT? I have far too many embarrassing moments to recall... I have this amazing ability to put my foot in it... like up to my neck. It's a gift!
HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE YOUR TECHNIQUE? That depends on the painting. When I paint with acrylics, I just use the age-old light onto dark method. If you look closely at those paintings, there is no real colour blending - forms are created by painting a lighter tone on top of a darker one. Acrylics lend themselves to this approach because they dry quickly and are opaque. It is just the very old technique used with painting in egg tempera, simply translated to acrylic. It also lends itself to the naive, graphic flavour of the pieces.
WHAT THEMES DO YOU PURSUE?
Steven in the Gustave Moreau Museum Paris
A bunch. Well, with these landscapes all I was trying to say was - this is such a lovely country we all live in. They are all sort of valentines to New Zealand.
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STEVEN SACATOS HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO FINISH A PIECE OF ART?
It usually takes me three months, 2 weeks, 5 days, 11 hours, 41 minutes and twelve seconds to finish a painting?! Ok, so that is a tad glib. Let me say that a painting tells you when it is finished, but of course you never know when that is going to be. WHAT MEMORABLE RESPONSES HAVE YOU HAD TO YOUR WORK? I used to sell prints of my pieces at the craft markets around Auckland. It was good fun, and I met a lot of really nice people. With a stall full of pieces on show reactions would range from someone saying "Hey! Wow!! Hey guys - come and look at this!!" all the way down to someone walking by very quickly, head down, as if he owed me money. But my favourite reaction was at the opening of a show that I had in Auckland. A young girl came up to me, and she showed me on her smartphone a photo she'd taken of a copy she'd made of one of my paintings. She had done a really good job of it, it was really very touching.
Steven working on the mural at Farina Restaurant.
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STEVEN SACATOS WHAT WOULD YOU NOT DO WITHOUT? Dental floss, garlic, olive oil, black coffee and my girl. (uhhm...she probably won't be too happy about the order of that!)
WHAT CURRENT ART TRENDS ARE YOU FOLLOWING? None of it. Whenever I look into a contemporary art magazine - I understand nothing, none of it. The 'art world' has become a circus, with the Emperor's new clothes on show for all to admire. I always look at old art - and that is what always seems new to me. (But actually I do like Banksy.)
WHAT OTHER ART ARE YOU PASSIONATE ABOUT?
Summer Night Drive. Acrylic on canvas.
Is 'passionate' the right word? I'm not sure if I'm that passionate about anything, really. Anyway... music. And if I really only had one choice, I'd ditch painting for it. I can't imagine life without music.
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To view Steven's images please click the link below: https://imagevault.co.nz/nz-artists/steven-sacatos/ Watch out for the release our of other Artitst e books.
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