“I'm continually searching for the play of darks against lights, expressed in vivid colors all in a painterly style. From florals to figures, the light becomes the drama, the feeling, the truth, which moves the viewer."

Sam D'Ambruoso of Middlebury, CT has been professionally painting landscapes and portraits since 1972. With over 25 years experience in teaching workshops and art instruction in the United States and in Italy, his artists' workshops in Tuscany, Amalfi, and Sicily as well as Old Lyme, CT and Block Island, RI have been widely acclaimed by past participants. A graduate of Providence College, he studied with:
• the internationally renowned landscape painter, Thomas Beuchner of Elmira, New York
• advanced landscape painting with Skip Whitcomb of Fort Collins, Colorado
• portraiture at the Paier College of Art, Hamden, CT with Joseph Funaro
• figure and portrait painting with Dan Gheno at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Art
• Laurel Stern Boecke at the Katonah Art Center.

He is a member of Connecticut Plein Air Painters Society, Connecticut Society of Portrait Artists, an Elected Artist at the Kent Art Association, Washington Art Association, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has been in regional as well as national landscape and figure shows. He was elected a landscape-painting instructor at the 2004 Arts and Materials Show, sponsored by American Artist Magazine, in Pasadena, CA. Many of his paintings are in public and private collections worldwide. His most recent landscape of the Connecticut River area was selected by Governor M. Jodi Rell and installed at the State of Connecticut Governor’s residence and now is included in the State’s Permanent Art Collection.

Other major portrait commissions have been;
• Mima Sirrocca of Santa Theresa, Sicily, niece of international designer, Gianni Versace.
• G. Scribner Bliss, restaurateur, Milford CT
• Saint Clare, for the Sisters of St. Clare, St. Clare Monastery, Stamford, Ct.
• The Fourteen Stations of the Cross, In Memory of Marie Aldrich, St. Gabriel’s Church, Stamford, Ct
Another Fourteen Stations of the Cross, St Aloysius Church, New Canaan, CT
• Commemorative Portrait of Edmund Strang, Scoutmaster, “Sixty Years in Scouting”, Founder, Cub Scouts of America.

Professional Affiliations:
1995 to present Appointed U.S. Coast Guard Artist’s Program
(COGAP;
1996 to present American Watercolor Society, Associate Member
1997 to 1999 Appointed to the Connecticut Commission on the
Arts;
1997 to present Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York;
1998 to present Connecticut Pastel Society;
2002 to 2011 Connecticut Society of Portrait Artists,
Stamford, CT;
2002 to present Lyme Art Association, Lyme, CT;
2004 to present Member, Portrait Society of America.