Gary Maggio is a self-taught artist whose work is largely impulsive and whimsical.

Using mostly pastels, sometimes in combination with pen and ink or oil paint, he conjures up imaginary humans in a way that a writer produces stories by stream of consciousness. Rarely preconceived or plotted out, the results are a blend of colors shaped into bodies and faces and souls that can be recognizable and resonant.

When Gary drifts toward more sensible drawing, he focuses mostly on people, either celebrities, friends or self-portraits. He also portrays animals, places and things. These are usually commissioned. But even these “realistic” works are freehand and infused with a slightly slanted perspective.

This website contains a range of his various styles and subjects, but a very small sampling. Like the weather in London, if you don’t like it today just wait a few hours, or contact him and he can steer you to many others.

(He has a friend who thinks, mythically, that all of his “people” whom he puts to paper had passed him on the street sometime in his early life – probably on the West Side in the 1970s – and they are now springing from his subconscious, a theory he likes and tends to doubt.)