Edward Gioachino Giobbi Connecticut (B. 1926 Still Life with Flowers, 1958 oil on canvas signed, titled and dated verso. Biography from the Archives of askART: The following information was submitted by Lui Antal Deak: Edward (Giaochino) Giobbi was born in 1926 in Katonah, New York. and grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut during the Great Depression. His poor, blue collar Italian immigrant family didn't have money for books but young Edward has heard many stories about the great Italian artists. Listening to proudly animated stories about Cimabue, Giotto, Brunelleschi and da Vinci in his native tongue made him decide to become an artist. After surviving the war as an infantry man, he began his formal art studies. Following five years of art schooling in Boston, Provincetown and New York he moved to Italy in 1951. In Florence he studied fresco painting and sculpture while embracing his ancestral cultural heritage. In 1954 he returned to New York and became surrounded by Abstract Expressionism. Although he worked and exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and was artistically pressured by them, he remained open to the influences of classic Italian art. "It was senseless for me to give up Giotto and Masaccio for Gorkey and Pollack. I felt that I could learn from them all."* In 1986, his personal friend Robert Motherwell declared to him that he was the only painter Motherwell knew who successfully combined the quattrocento with modern art. 10 1/2"H x 8 1/2"W (sight), 12"H x 10"W (frame)