Giorgio Cavallon’s paintings are full of light and color. He painted with white more than most painters do—there’s a quality of air and openness. Neither lack of resources nor political upheaval kept Giorgio Cavallon from developing himself as an artist. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1920, at the age of sixteen. He got a job in a factory in Massachusetts. In Italy, he’d been working on farms. In an interview, Cavallon says, “ever since I remember I was working all the time…Never had any childhood to play and all that, really,” describing the gruelling farm days, with work beginning at 2 a.m. because it was cooler for the oxen. Still, he would “scribble,” when he could. It’s exhausting to track Cavallon’s biography: this factory job, that odd job, back to Italy, back to America. He got a job with the WPA arts project, but first spent over a year building scaffolding for the muralists before being transferred to Arshille Gorky’s studio—sometimes his handiness worked against him. Once, he told someone he was a painter, and they assumed “house painter” and hired him—he worked that job for $3 a day for a year. I’ve worked as a curriculum consultant, to diversify texts. Women, queer people, people of color, and working-class people are often left out of history. We are absent or misrepresented from subjects ranging from art to literature to science. “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Doors,” one framework for curriculum revision is called. I’m impressed by Cavallon’s determination to make art, despite his constant precarity. At twenty-one, he started taking art lessons, saying to himself, “I’m not going to do my life just to work in a factory…” Cavallon was a non-representational painter, but to me, all his paintings are windows. I can’t help but see them that way.
-Morgan English