HIGHLANDS RANCH, Colo. — [17-09-2026] — I’m Joseph S. Sturniolo, a watercolor artist, and I’ve built my work around a simple belief: the most ordinary faces are the ones worth looking at hardest.
I don’t paint pretty pictures. I paint moments in time. A single face can hold years of love, pain, and sorrow, and when I sit down to paint one, I’m not after a likeness I’m after what a person carries. What they feel. What their eyes quietly tell. My hope is that someone stops in front of one of my paintings and gazes at it as if it were speaking to them, because in a way, it is.
That’s why so many of my subjects are people the rest of the world tends to pass by. One of the paintings closest to me is called The Lathe a portrait of a retired engineer at his machine, lost in his craft. I wasn’t trying to make him look impressive. I was trying to capture the drama of an ordinary man at his work through the play of light across his hands and face and I caught him, the light, and the quiet dignity of the moment all at once. To me, that’s what a working life looks like, and it deserves to be seen.
Every painting I make starts with a feeling, and every one carries a message. I work in transparent watercolor, an honest and unforgiving medium there’s no hiding a mistake, and no going back. I spend as much thought on composition as on the face itself, because I want a viewer’s eye led exactly where the story lives. My aim is always the same: to make you pause on a person you might otherwise have overlooked.
Nowhere is that truer than in my Faces of Ukraine series. When the war began, my mind went straight to the ordinary people caught inside it their courage, and the suffering that had to come with it. I searched for faces that carried all of that emotion and painted them. These works are not for sale and never will be; I show them only so that anyone who stands before them might regard Ukrainians a little differently than they did before. If a stranger’s face on paper can do that, then the painting has done its work.
I paint portraits of people I know, people I’ve only glimpsed, and people whose stories reached me from far away. Different faces, one purpose to slow someone down long enough to really see another human being.
My portrait and figure work, along with my water and landscape scenes, can be viewed at my website. Commissioned portraits are available for those who’d like a face of their own preserved on paper.
Media Contact:
Joseph S. Sturniolo
(303) 883-3083
https://www.josephsturnioloartwork.com/
info@josephsturnioloartwork.com
Highlands Ranch, Colorado
