Art Takes Syosset's Cavayero to Japan

Growing up in Syosset, 22-year-old artist Michael Cavayero always loved to draw. He began when he was only 2 years old.

"I would sit in my basement. I had a yellow Playskool table and it was my studio," Cavayero says over the phone from Japan, where he is currently in a seven-month residency. "I had this babysitter named Holly. She was my next-door neighbor but sort of like my first muse. I renamed her Holly Jason Cavayero because I wanted us to be linked. But with her I used to stage all my greatest ideas, and then at school I would always be making something, in the hallway, at my desk. I never stopped."

What began as simple drawings of friends has turned into celebrity works of art. Well known as a portrait artist, Cavayero's paintings include actresses Lindsay Lohan and Meryl Streep, to name a few.

Cavayero's thought process in deciding who to draw can best be described as intense.  

On Lohan: "In painting Lindsay I chose to face the viewer with a representation that was so perverse to the subject of painting that I knew if I painted it, the idea would perform almost an attack on painting and on my audience. I'm really interested in honesty." 

On Streep: "I wanted her to have an uncanniness of youth like something you've seen before but it's been forgotten, something before it's been touched or moved. It's almost ethereal what I am trying to get with her in these paintings."

The Brooklyn resident is now living in Kyoto, Japan to expand his skills in woodblock printmaking and paper making. Fluent in Japanese, Cavayero is embracing his temporary home.

"Japan is a very intense, focused country," Cavayero says. "It's an island, so there is the sense of selfness that I don't think is present in most other places. Kyoto really haunts me. There is a feeling of emptiness, like a ghost because it's surrounded by mountains and so you are inside this hollowness like a bowl."

The atmosphere is a constant inspiration for Cavayero.

"I'm inspired by the way everything looks--the bamboo, ink paintings, the food," he says. "I have frogs outside my window. Everything is so acoustic here and Kyoto is an enchanting city. I live up in the mountains. Every night, it gets cold and I can see the moon changing colors from red to gold to white like a pearl."

His travels aside, Cavayero still fondly remembers his hometown.

"My mother still lives in Fairhaven Apartments," Cavayero says, later adding, "I love Syosset. I love the trees along the golf course on the way to the school by the Pine Hollow Country Club. We use to eat in the Celebrity Diner a lot and at The Healthy Eatery."

He has worked with great artists such as Maureen Gallace and Ross Bleckner. But Cavayero, whose work has been featured near (Massachusetts) and far (China), hopes to make his own mark without compromising.

He says simply, "I want to always make good art."

Michael Cavayero has an exhibition at the Whitewash Studio, 249 Main St., Amagansett, through June 27. For more information, visit www.whitewashstudio.net.