Artist Statement

“When I paint, I go sailing.”

      Offshore, inshore, marshes, waterways, racing skipper, cruiser…

       Mr. del Piano estimates he has actually been under sail for about 16,000 hours over a period of 60 years. (At an average speed of 3.5 mph, that works out to about 50,000 miles.) The time he has spent in boatyards, the time he has spent building and repairing boats, the time in power boats and even some time designing a yacht are extra. This history is what gives del Piano's paintings their authenticity.

“The essence of my paintings comes from memory. I'm a studio painter. When it comes to painting the interplay of wind, sea, sky and the way a ship or boat "lives" in its environment you can't look it up....you have to have been there. Of course, if I intend to render a ship that sailed 150 years ago, I need to do some research to reproduce it's detail, but it is the same ocean, the same wind, the same sky, the same wave under the stern, and the same spirit of the moment that I share with all mariners, modern or ancient.”

  “My ship portraits are not meant to romanticize an era. They are intended to stand as reminders of an ethical and moral approach to working and creating  that could (to paraphrase Plato) serve both the body and soul and also by which people might find their salvation.”

  “The purpose of Art is to help us attune our distorted patterns of thought to the Cosmic Harmonies.” (Plato)

     Mr. del Piano traces his maritime roots on his mother's side, Ethel Hartt, back to Edmund Hartt's Shipyard in Boston where the "Constitution" was built, and, on his father's side, to the Bethlehem Steel Shipyard in Quincy, Mass. where he was a ship's welder during WWII. His father was an avid sailor and boat builder all of his life thereafter and passed that knowledge and experience onto his son.