Brad M. Vaccaro

        Hello and welcome to my online portfolio. I am Brad Vaccaro, a multi-media artist currently obtaining an art education degree from Rhode Island College. Since I was a child, I was fixated on artmaking. As the second child of a middle-class family, my parents worked hard for what we had. At three months old a family friend, Diane Ferrara offered to babysit me while they worked. Her husband, Emile Ferrara, was a retired art teacher who got his master’s degree from RISD. He exposed me to the philosophies of the impressionists by bringing me into the woods, where I developed a love for nature and art. Over time he became my greatest mentor and teacher. He introduced me to the work of the greats at a young age and followed museums and gallery visits. I would watch him paint and sculpt as a child, and he noticed my intent observation of his work and put a chisel in my hand at three years old. He fed my curiosity in the arts. So when he would paint, I would too. I started painting landscapes with him when I was about six years old. He put some of my paintings into a few juried shows when I was just nine years old. From that moment on, I needed to make art in one form or another; if it wasn’t visual, it was musical. 

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        In my teens, I leaned heavier on the musical side of art. Even in those early days painting with Emile, music was always filling the studio, jazz, classical, light rock, and I loved it all. I expanded my musical pallet to hard rock, pop, punk, funk, metal, and industrial metal in my teens, which ultimately developed my visual aesthetic and chemical enhancements. Those days of boredom, wandering blindly in the industrial swamps trying to kill time, I always had a sketchbook, scribbling laughable tiny images, but after that, I couldn’t stop. I started sculpting in ceramics, wining a scholastic award for a sculpture I made my senior year of high school. That summer, I had my first successful drawing with my established style. After that, I spent years hitting and missing. With every picture, I got closer to what I wanted my artwork to be.  I failed dozens of times to get a drawing close to my vision. As my artistic interests grew, they diversified into several different media and processes, including digital media, ceramics, painting, and printmaking, to list a few. In college, I took it upon myself to refine my artistic skill focusing primarily on printmaking and ceramics. Following in my mentor’s footsteps, I furthered my artistic philosophy by obtaining an art education degree. Through this degree I was granted sight into the flexibility that is allowed through education and familiarized myself with the different teaching philosophies, ultimately refining my own teaching philosophy which in turn fueled my artistic philosophy.  I completed all the available undergraduate studio levels in ceramics and printmaking due to the complexity of the processes. Most of the artwork on this website is for sale. If you are interested in making a purchase, you can reach me through my contact information.