35 years an Artist
by Daniel Sammartano
My father possessed a restlessness that woke him every morning before dawn; a stirring I came to recognize as the mark of a creative soul. Each morning his eyes opened in the dark, and nothing else would do until he had fed his muse— a sunrise over the Atlantic. That’s how Vito was remembered by many— a man alone on the shore, camera in hand, a lit pipe between his teeth, quietly witnessing the shifting colors of dawn over North Beach.
He was born to Sicilian immigrants, and didn’t learn English until he was six. But even before he found his voice in words, he was already speaking in images—first doodling, then drawing and eventually painting. In high school, at seventeen, he completed and framed his first true work of art: a watercolor over pen and ink on craft paper depicting a two-masted square-rigged ship battling rolling seas. Below it, a skiff, rowed by two fishermen, straining against the waves—a scene full of motion and tension, perhaps a reflection of his life at the time.
The paint on that ship had barely dried when Vito enlisted in the Navy, just one month shy of his eighteenth birthday. Even aboard the USS Picket and later the Biloxi during World War II, his dream of becoming an artist never wavered. He was honorably discharged from active duty on July 13, 1946, not yet nineteen. On his discharge papers, under job preference, he wrote “Artist – Mass.,” and for future training, simply “College – Art.” Vito always knew exactly who he was meant to be.
By the mid-1950s, his commitment to painting had solidified, launching a 25-year career that—though brief in years—was rich in output and evolution. Over that time, his work moved through four distinct stylistic phases: modern abstract, hard-edged abstract landscape, hard-edged mixed media, and ultimately, representational watercolor— a more commercial endeavor. Each phase marked a transformation, not just in technique, but in how he saw and interpreted the world.
Vito was influenced by artists who viewed the world through a similar lens. The only one I ever heard him speak of was Morris Louis (1912–1962), a painter whose work deeply resonated with him. Louis, fifteen years Vito’s senior, entered his Stripe period in 1961— though cut short by his death a year later. While Louis’s stripes ran vertically, Vito’s interpretation took a different path. Influenced by the vast, horizontal sweep of Cape Cod’s shoreline, his work during what became his hard-edge period bore that grounded coastal geometry.
Others, too, influenced his work: Larry Poons (1937 - ), Ad Reinhardt (1913 – 1967), Jack Bush (1909 – 1977), Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011), and Phil Hicken (1910 – 1985) of Nantucket. These artists were among others who inspired and motivated Vito to create his own works of art on canvas in similar styles. The Color Field style of abstract painting helped shape Vito’s visual language, especially the bold, hardedge style that defined his most dominant work. Still, Vito never mimicked—he translated, filtered through his experience, and poured onto canvas something unmistakably his own.
Though a dedicated educator and painter, Vito was also a worker. The demands of supporting a family inevitably tugged at the time he might have devoted entirely to his art. He lacks a Wikipedia page, though he’s left a profound impact on scores of people. Indeed, Vito was perhaps less known for his artwork than for his teaching and mentoring, shaping the lives of hundreds of young followers and students throughout the 1960s and 1970s.
Young or old, Vito left an impression on everyone he met, from every station in life. One colleague put it best: “Vito walked among paupers and also among kings.” Starting his mornings at Red’s Coffee Shop in Chatham, he shared easy conversation with fishermen and tradesmen, never once mentioning his appointment to the Mass. Council of the Arts and Humanities or his invitation to the 1976 Presidential Inauguration. In fact, he would then leave Red’s for a grueling twelve-hour shift managing the Chatham Beach and Tennis Club, sometimes seven days a week. During the summers, Vito only painted at night.
People naturally gathered around him—not because he asked for it, but because he radiated something magnetic. “If you see a pack of students in the corridor,” a colleague of his once said, “Vito is probably in the center.” He was sharp-witted, warm, and full of charisma. As a teacher, he gave freely—of technique, of stories, of encouragement. He didn’t just teach art; he taught presence, confidence, and compassion. With just a few thoughtful words, he made everyone around him feel seen.
Frank Keegan, the President of Salem State University, recognized Vito’s talent and asked him to become his assistant in 1976, and then sworn in by the governor of Massachusetts, Frank Sargent, to serve on the Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities. When Vito inevitably stepped down a few years later from these offices to feed his painting, he left a gift of open communication among the groups he served. And he was missed.
Vito always thought of himself as someone who escaped his working class, immigrant roots by what he called living by his wits, alone. The fact is, he was never alone; he always had a hoard of loyal fans just waiting for him in the wings. I bore witness to this fact, and in writing this now, swear off any embellishment. Vito was just that popular.
He loved people, so it is indeed odd that his paintings don’t contain people, save his first, at age seventeen. The rich bands of color and quality of flatness and rigidity also seem to belie the roundness of his character. The nature of his unpeopled canvases, and straight hardedged lines, seem to contradict the activities that filled his life. It could be said that his life was so occupied with people he painted to cleanse himself of everything that he gave when he wasn’t painting. It was an intentional respite from all that was demanded of him, from his corporeal self, and from us, his family. Vito always painted alone.
Some think his work was purely abstract, from the mind alone, and a friend who believed this once asked, "Why do you take so many photos, Vito?" And he, as was his manner, flatly replied, "You have to see it before you can paint it." Dumbfounded by the simplicity and accuracy of this answer, his friend attempted "to see" what Vito was looking at. However, the scene had already changed in those seconds, and they both looked out at the difference. Now, only the camera held the memory.
A pilot friend remarked that one of his paintings resembled what the pilot saw from the cockpit of his plane at 20,000 feet around 4:00 a.m. The more pedestrian remembrance of that place in the sky from the aircraft was placidly blue, beige, and, perhaps, green. But Vito knew that within the space of those tranquil bands of color, there dwelled other things, like the myriad lives being born, or eaten, or dying and rejuvenating there, in infinite variety.
In the late 1970s, Sammartano’s hardedge began to show signs of the organic, reminiscent of his earlier sketches and paintings. Finally, his work, temporarily diminished in size, began to represent the subject more. The later work was meant to interpret something more like the vision of a passerby, giving the subject a view of something highly identifiable— a salt marsh, a dune shack, or a spit of land. For certain, by 1979, the death of his hardedge was at hand. Had he survived to paint in the 1980s and beyond, we have only his later, softer, more organic interpretations from which to speculate.
When Vito was sick with cancer, a young artist he once knew couldn't believe the consistency of his discipline. She said, “I can't believe he still paints every day!” But painting was his life's blood, and his style of living was predicated on facilitating that endeavor. The young woman didn't realize the nature of Vito’s optimism, nor did any of us, and he maintained it for a while. But while the sun never stops shining, the day always comes to an end. And Vito made it a lifetime project to defy this celestial law by painting near the edge of his sunrise.
