Obituary of Salvatore Stephen Casa

What is past is prologue Salvatore Stephen Casa December 20, 1927-December 4, 2019 It was the early 1940s when a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City noticed a kid who repeatedly parked himself on the cold marble bench in front of the “The Horse Fair,” Rosa Bonheur’s massive tangle of shadow and light that brought to life the Paris horse market. The kid, young Sammy Casa from 2nd Avenue, would take the subway up to 82nd Street to study Bonheur’s masterwork for hours, absorbing the way she used perspective, color, and light to bring the sweaty, chaotic Parisian scene to life. Taking full advantage of free admission to the Met during wartime, the boy would come to exemplify the words of the museum director that the Met “must take its part in the general mobilization of the mind, without which our democratic culture cannot survive.” What Salvatore Stephen Casa took from Bonheur and The Met was the beginning, not only of a lifelong study of art, but the prism through which he viewed the world. He would eventually learn everything he could about the artists there and would go on to create hundreds of his own paintings and sketches -- many of them social and political commentaries -- and inspire countless students across a career that spanned nearly 75 years. To say he loved art would be to diminish art’s influence on the boy and later the man. Art was part of him, a way of being that informed everything he would become and every choice he would make. He loved other things – baseball, bullfights, opera – that shared an aesthetic, a symmetry and pageantry disrupted by drama that carried through to his approach to the canvas. Sal Casa was the beloved only child of Italian immigrants Vincenzo Casa, a poet and self-trained hotel chef from Sicily, and Giuseppina Tibaldi, a diminutive hotel maid who had voyaged from Parma to America on her own, with $50 worth of self-earned lire in her pocketbook. Born at Bellevue Hospital on Dec. 20, 1927, he grew up among an extended and somewhat incongruent Italian family that encompassed his father’s Sicilian background, his mother’s northern Emilia-Romagna roots, and both parents’ spirit of courage, beauty and discovery. Their mixed marriage – unorthodox for the time – blended food and cultural traditions and the vastly different Italian dialects that became Sal’s first language. His second, English, was marked by the native speech of tides of migrants – German, Polish, Irish, Jewish, Italian – whose rounded “L”s and blunted “Th”s were rolled into the accent of early 20th century midtown Manhattan. And the hues of Manhattan became his palette. From the second-floor of their red brick tenement building, as a young boy he would venture out under the neighborhood’s watchful eyes to procure sheep’s heads from the butcher or thread from the dry goods shop. He played stickball with friends on the nearby East River lot that today houses the United Nations, and helped his papa stash truckloads of grapes in the basement, where they were distilled into the year’s wine supply and carried by subway to family gatherings in Brooklyn to be judged against uncles’ vintages. As a teenager, Sal had stayed home from one such gathering, where wounded Sicilian pride erupted into violence that put Vincenzo in the hospital with a stab wound to the abdomen. A New York policeman rapped on the door to deliver the news to Sal, who spent a sleepless night terrified for his father’s life and for the retribution that tradition dictated would fall to him should Vincenzo not survive. He did survive, but a family rift was born that night – one that would loose the bonds of Old World tradition, eventually taking Sal and later his parents far from New York and family. Sal attended the parochial school at St. Agnes Roman Catholic parish, a stone’s throw from the Beaux-Arts Grand Central Terminal and the towering art deco Chrysler Building. It was there that one prescient nun saw potential in the boy’s constant sketching in the margins of his textbooks, and had the foresight not to discipline him, but to provide him with paper and pencils. It fueled both his passion and his impatience. His parents’ were dismayed and angry when they discovered that Sal had dropped out of high school. A job as a film courier for the New York Daily News gave him a press box view at Yankee Stadium. And although he had to leave the Bronx in the 7th inning to get the film back to midtown in time for deadline, Sal had seen the magic of Lou Gehrig and Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio. With the throwing arm and stickball swing from his days on that dusty East River lot, he built out enough skill to earn himself a tryout with the Yankees and eventually a spot on a triple-A Yankees farm team. Sal spent one memorable summer as a lifeguard on Nantucket and served two brief stints in the U.S. military – first as a soldier and then as a Marine stationed in Japan, where he worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for the base newspaper. In between, he studied at the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts in New York before moving to Washington, DC, to apprentice under the painter Henry Papaso. There, he met and married Lorna Jane Goltl, a young Valparaiso College grad from Kansas whose aspirations for a Foreign Service career were not unhappily derailed by the arrival of a son, Vincent Matthew, named for each of his grandfathers. The new family soon decamped to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where Sal studied at the Instituto Allende; baby Matt grew brown under the Mexican sun and fat on mashed avocados; and Sal and Jane developed friendships that endured time and distance. They returned to New York, this time to Brooklyn, living on the second floor of Vincenzo and Giuseppina’s Prospect Avenue home. A second baby, Kathryn Josephine, arrived in 1957 and three years later, longing for space and, as Sal put it, “a place to spit,” they packed their belongings into a U-Haul trailer, installed the children in the sprawling backseat of a 1957 Chevy, and set out across America for greener pastures, with Jane teaching her New York husband how to drive along the way. Three-thousand miles later, in the middle of the night, they pulled into a farm in rural Capay, in Glenn County, Calif., as far geographically and culturally from New York as it’s possible to get within the mainland United States. In an unlikely partnership with Jane’s Hungarian Kansas parents, Matt and Sophie Goltl, they raised cattle and prunes, grew chicken and vegetables. The boy from Manhattan learned how to burn hay stubble, frame out a house, and breed Brangus cattle. Several years later, Sal’s parents left New York to join them on the farm. Jane went back to college to become an elementary school teacher and Sal started a business painting houses, at times creating huge reclining nudes across a customer’s wall before applying the final coat. The extended family moved from Capay to Orland, where a second son, Stephen Christopher, was born in 1967. In 1968, Sal approached the art department at Chico State College with his work, and Sal’s love affair with teaching, and with Chico, ensued. He began teaching classes at the university, joining an esteemed group of artists that included Ann Pierce, Ken Morrow, and Janet Turner. Concurrently, Sal earned a master’s degree in art, capping his studies in 1974 with an exhibit called The Windows, which represented a re-examination of the direction and underlying meaning in his work. “…[I]t became apparent to me that I was in conflict with myself,” he wrote in the accompanying text. Dissatisfied with “superficial mannerisms which had no basis for being present,” he decided to “go back to the beginning and once again become involved with the basic principles of picture making – structure and design,” drawing heavily upon the interplay of shadow and light, positive and negative, presence and absence. Sal’s work would shift many more times over the decades, drawing inspiration from everyone from Goya and Rembrandt to Willem deKooning and Joan Mitchell to Andrew Wyeth, with no small regard for Burne Hogarth’s Tarzan and Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant. “If you’re going to paint something and you know what it’s going to look like, why do it?” he told one reporter. “A painting should leave something to the imagination, even to the person that did it.” His paintings were exhibited nationwide, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Instituto Allende, Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum, the National and American Watercolor Society annuals, New York’s Academy of Design, the Springfield [Missouri] Art Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art , and many more. His work hangs in many private collections, as well as the permanent collections of the Jersey City Museum, Instituto Allende, the Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York, St. John's Lutheran Church in Sacramento, and California State University, Chico. He was a Gold medal winner, Signature Member and Dolphin Fellow of the American Watercolor Society and was featured in a center spread in American Watercolor magazine. Even after retiring from the university, Sal never relinquished his role as teacher or painter. Back in a second-floor walk-up – this time a studio on Third Street overlooking downtown Chico – he continued to paint, to search, to learn. He surrounded himself with friends who loved him, including many students at Chico Art Center, where he taught until September 2019, just two months before he died. In 2014, he recounted to the Chico Enterprise-Record what he told his students: “To draw, you need to destroy, meaning you must challenge yourself to let go of what you know and risk moving forward.” On December 4, 2019, at the age of 91, Salvatore Casa let go of what he knew. He was preceded in death by his parents and his son, Matt. He leaves behind his daughter, Kate, of Vermont; his son, Stephen, of Los Angeles; three grandchildren, Robert MacIntosh of Kansas; Samia Abbass of Vermont; and Amal Abbass of New York City, and his former wife, Jane, of Chico. He leaves a community that he loved; a community that loves him. His extraordinary body of work lives on. To send a flower arrangement or to plant trees in memory of Salvatore Stephen Casa, please click here to visit our Sympathy Store.