Artists spend their lives bringing the attention of the public to their wide and varied subject matter, but a new exhibit at ARTISANworks focuses on artists themselves as subjects. Local painter Joseph Accorso has depicted 50 artists, including many household names and a handful of local artists, and in each portrait Accorso has also recreated one of the subject's works, providing a further study of the artist and his or her impact on humanity's visual history. "I have always loved artists' stories; their motivations, work routines, and naturally their art," says Accorso. "Being an art teacher for 22 years fostered that passion."

This exhibit is the culmination of four prolific years of work by Accorso, in which he translated legendary artists and their works, ranging in media from various paint types and sculptural materials, photography, printmaking, and more, into oil or acrylic on 2'x4' panels. Accorso's depiction of the chilly glow of marble of Bernini's "David" is especially telling of his skill as a painter. "I picked artists who had the raw and irrepressible need to create," he says. "The drive, the need to create, the work ethic, the persistence is what I identify with in all the artists, whenever they lived." Each panel is accompanied by a couple of paragraphs from the artist providing further insight.

Accorso chose to paint some artists standing in front of what is arguably their most iconic work, as with his "Picasso," which features "Guernica." In other instances, more obscure works were chosen: "Warhol" is positioned not in front of Marilyn or soup cans, but a grid of silkscreened skulls, and "Da Vinci" is not posing with Mona Lisa or Christ and his dining disciples, but studies of horses and weapons and women, revealing his innovative mind. "I wanted to portray da Vinci's almost limitless vision," says Accorso. "‘Mona Lisa' and 'The Last Supper' are so iconic that they have become virtually wallpaper images in our age."

The artist also made studied decisions regarding the cropping of the artists' works, often focusing on revealing details, as in "Stieglitz," which has the epic-mustachioed photographer positioned in front of one of his photos of partner and muse, Georgia O'Keeffe. The image zeroes in on her expressive hands, fingers seemingly flashing a secret "I love you" gesture I hadn't noticed before seeing this focused version of the image. In "Dali," the elegantly bizarre Salvador stands calmly beneath the rearing horse of "The Temptation of Saint Anthony," the afflicted man seen only as a hand bearing a cross in the lower left corner.

All of the portraits are done in Accorso's style of painting, but the replicas of the art works closely resemble the style of his subjects, so sometimes the background is jarringly different from the style of the portrait. The most exaggerated example is "Lichtenstein," where the realistic portrait of the artist pops dark and solid atop the colorful, striped, and dotty background of "Bedroom at Arles."

The personalities of some of the artists lay behind the stone walls of their blank or faraway expressions, but in other cases, the artists exude strong temperaments. "Pollock" looks every bit as tortured as he was. Here, Accorso also had the tedious task of replicating a Pollock without actually splattering the paint: because the likeness can't be replicated by the chaos of splattering, Accorso recreated "Number 7" in layers of dabs and lines.

Interesting decisions in perspective enhance the portraits: in "Paley," our local man of steel stands beneath his soaring "Sentinel," the sky-high work foreshortened realistically. In "Netsky," local printmaker, professor, and writer Ron seems to stand within the subdued dream-scene tall trees of his "Pine Forest IV" cardiograph. And "DeKooning," like most of the artists, is facing us, but painting a thick yellow line on an invisible canvas between himself and the viewer. His painting also covers the field behind him on the panel, so he's becoming effectively enveloped by it, swaddled in his creation.

Except for the few local exceptions (Netsky, Paley, watercolorist Ralph Avery, Ramone Santiago, a self-portrait by Accorso, and a portrait of his father among them), the body of work mostly celebrates iconic household names. Interestingly, the show more of less reflects the long-standing focus of the art world on white European and American males. Some exceptions include female and minority artists who have achieved immortality in art history books, such as Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. Five women artists are represented (10 percent of the whole), three non-white artists (6 percent), and the rest are white American or European male artists. The subject matter of the artists Accorso chose varied widely, from religious iconography to abstracts, but where it came to depictions of humans, six works depict non-whites (12 percent), and 13 works are of women (26 percent), with some crossover, such as the Native American woman represented in Accorso's Charles M. Russell tribute.

In each of the works, Accorso provides his viewers not only with the likenesses of these greats, but also windows into their lives, work, and concerns. The troubled "Caravaggio" portrait includes a detail of "David with the Head of Goliath," and Accorso has positioned the artist's face close to the chiaroscuro grotesque severed head to emphasize that Caravaggio used himself as a model for the doomed giant. The accompanying anecdote tells us that the artist was an accused murderer on the lam to escape his death sentence, and sent this painting to the pope as a pardon plea. This sort of humanizing of a dead-and-gone artist is a big, important mark of a great lover and teacher of art history - the ability to make a potentially dry subject interesting by lending us a peek into the intrigue of so many otherwise often-obscure lives.

"Master/Subjects"

By Joseph Accorso

Through August 28

The Elizabeth Regional Gallery at ARTISANworks, 565 Blossom Rd.

Fri-Sat 11 a.m.-6 p.m., Sun Noon-5 p.m. | $8-$12 | 288-7170, artisanworks.net