Meet Renaissance Man, Robert Verdi

Robert Verdi's career in the arts was launched at the age of six when a nun in the elementary school he attended taught how to draw with crayons. Soon known as "the class artist," holidays would find him decorating the blackboards using his own colored chalks. His mother was certain that he was the next Leonardo Da Vinci. As he grew older, he graduated to paints and charcoal. His art education came through countless days of visiting museums and galleries with his favorite being MOMA and his preferred artist Picasso. These regular outings trained his eye in a most significant manner.

In the time-honored tradition of the Middle Age Guilds, he developed his talents working with the masters of his day – be they in photography, painting, hair-styling or sculpture.

Decades later, his mother would surely be proud as he prepares to show his latest paintings in a solo exhibition at the Westhampton Free Library in Westhampton Beach running December 1 through December 31.            

His lifelong career in the arts took him to the film sets of Hollywood, glamorous fashion shoots around the world with famed photographers, backstage at Broadway shows and eventually to Park Avenue where he owned the chicest salon in town — but painting remained his passion.

Verdi got his first taste of fame in the world of high fashion as a photographer, stylist and makeup artist to the top fashion magazines, working with the most creative talents of the time including iconic photographer Richard Avedon and the legendary "Empress of Fashion" Vogue editor Diana Vreeland.

His fashion world experience led him to open his own salon at the Sheraton Ambassador Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, where he employed a staff of 28, designing hairstyles for actors and actresses, as well as fashion models and editors.  Contributing regularly to the pages of major fashion magazines as a photographer, stylist and make-up artist, he worked with all the top designers and traveled extensively on location for fashion shoots with such famed photographers as Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn and Bert Stern. In time, he created a separate studio where he could paint and photograph.

He also built ongoing relationships with cosmetic giants Revlon, Clairol, Pantene, and

L'Oreal. His specialty was high style "beauty shots" for promotion and package design.

As well, he continued to provide his extraordinary talents for Broadway and film performers creating hairstyles for Tammy Grimes in "The Unsinkable Molly Brown," for Mary Pickett in "Sunrise at Campobello" for Nancy Olsen in "Send Me No Flowers."

His devoted celebrity clientele included Frank Sinatra, Mary Tyler Moore, Ann Margaret, Mia Farrow and Sophia Loren. He regularly coiffed Marilyn Monroe and even did her hair for her marriage to Arthur Miller. Long before there was a Frederic Fekkai or Vidal Sassoon, there was Robert Verdi, the first celebrity hairstylist.

But Verdi always returned to painting when he could find time and, over the course of the years, taught himself how to work with oils. His paintings have been exhibited since 1970 in New York City, Vermont, Westhampton Beach and East Hampton. For the past nine years Verdi has directed most of his creative energies to painting. He now uses acrylics, which he dries with a salon hair dryer and continues to work in photography and sculpture.

This exhibition will highlight new pieces from his very popular "Barn Series" as well as a new group of bold, eye-popping abstract paintings.

His Barn Series paintings of barns and farmhouses in New England and on the East End of Long Island are contemporary American documents. At heart, Verdi is a purist/constructivist. His deceptively simple compositions are reminiscent of works by Milton Avery and Charles Sheller with a touch Paul Klee's whimsy and the opulent surfaces of Gustav Klimt's early landscape paintings.

Verdi paints now primarily with acrylic on canvas and is able to obtain tonal depth, texture and profound color saturation with this often blunt and lifeless medium. He has an innate sense of place and volume; of how a building "sits" on a site and how sky and ground delimit and enhance his personality-filled barns. His paintings have the power to stay in the mind's eye long after viewing them. The barn/landscape paintings are bona-fide American classics, documents that acknowledge the past and looks toward the future.

Last year, the "Barn Series" and Verdi's overall body of work led him to be chosen one of a select group of artists for Long Island Pulse's Annual Artist VIP List.

Verdi first came to the East End in 1989, renting a home in Montauk and taking a year off from the glamour life to paint full time. He acknowledges that it was a "terrible mistake." The isolation of a painter's life mid winter made him feel lost and insecure.

Fortunately, before the year ended he met famed Hamptons' realtor Norma Reynolds who like Verdi was an artist as well having given up a successful career as a fashion illustrator to try her hand at real estate. The pair was soon married and enjoyed a wonderful loving relationship until her sudden death in 2008.

Most recently his painting has taken on a more abstract turn and he is creating powerful, boldly colored images that are a visual feast for the eye. He will debut these new works in this solo exhibition at the Westhampton Free Library

Carolyn Kendall Buchter and Diiana Steinberg will host a special reception for the artist on Friday, December 3 from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.  The event will benefit the library's programs. In addition to donating one of his large-scale paintings to the library, the artist is donating a generous percentage of sales.

The Westhampton Free Library is located at 7 Library Avenue, Westhampton Beach, New York 11978. For more information visit, www.westhamptonlibrary.net or call (631) 288-3335.