As a little girl growing up in Brooklyn, artist Dolores Caporale of Hicksville spent endless hours lost in a world of her own creation. Never found far from her sketchbook, the young art hopeful was constantly drawing some of the most famous movie stars of the day.
“I can still envision the wall of my bedroom covered with all of those sketches. Tyrone Power, Erol Flynn, I sketched them from movie magazines,” Caporale says, smiling at the memory.
It wasn’t long before people took notice of her talent. Some of her earliest teachers in grammar school encouraged Caporale to take as many art classes as she could and she was happy to comply. “They had a huge art program in my school so I took art all day,” she says.
The art classes paid off. By the time she graduated high school she won a prestigious scholarship to attend The Traphagen School of Fashion in Manhattan. Soon after graduation she was hired as an art illustrator for a fashion design magazine. “We would go to all of the French fashion shows at the Waldorf Astoria where I would sketch the latest designs,” she said.
Caporale spent three years as an illustrator immersed in the world of fashion, until marrying her husband Louis. The two settled in Hicksville where she stayed home to raise their two daughters and son. Her creative juices constantly flowing, by the time they were school age, Caporale was ready to get back to her craft, this time as a painter.
She was able to meld both her roles as a mother and an emerging painter, finding ways to create her earliest works any time and place she could. “Back then I painted in my kitchen all the time,” laughs Caporale.
It wasn’t long before Caporale decided to take her artwork outside of her kitchen. “I started painting landscapes right on site. I was enthralled with the beaches and joined a group that met and worked all across Long Island every week.”
Diligently working week after week, Caporale created the first of her painted series of landscapes. Her work encompassed many of Long Island’s park settings and beach scenes.
Always growing as an artist Caporale next signed up for a workshop to hone her skills from childhood of creating figures. Inspired by her newfound genre Caporale went on to create a new series of paintings, this one of female nudes. “I always do my work in series. I work as much as I can in a certain area, then I start a new series,” Caporale explains.
Next in her creative process, she ventured into the bold artistic world of abstracts. “Doing abstracts was so fun and completely different. I was happy doing that for a long time,” says Caporale.
Many of Caporale’s inspirations for her abstracts came during her travels out west, particularly Sedona, Arizona. The abstracts transitioned into her next series, inspired by the works of artist Mark Rotchko, she began a series of paintings she calls “Earth and Sky Meeting”. “The touching of the Earth and sky, that meeting of the horizon to me is the great mystery,” she says.
Ever enthusiastic about her craft and progression as an artist, Caporale’s most recent series has brought her back to her artistic roots. “I went back to drawing figures, my original love.” Her latest series is of both a visual and narrative tone. “It is important to me that this series speaks to the viewer.”
Caporale still meets and works with an artist group on a weekly basis. Her work has been in galleries all across the East Coast and she has gone on to sell countless pieces and received numerous awards.
With the same zest and enthusiasm she had all those years ago drawing sketches of movie stars, Caporale’s creative juices are still constantly flowing. “I have so many new ideas. I need more than one lifetime to do all the creative work I want to do,” she laughs.
View more of Caporale’s work at www.dolorescaporale.com.
