Local artist continues old-school traditions

Kimberley McGee

Friday, May 4, 2001 | 9 a.m.

Brushes with famous stars illuminate his career, yet he prefers to teach a 400-year-old technique to local painters.

International artist Cotti was commissioned by Orson Welles, Josephine Baker and Marlene Dietrich to paint their likeness in his bold style.

But he has more to share than his celebrity portraits.

"These are techniques that the masters, Rembrandt, perfected," said Cotti, at his West Las Vegas apartment and studio on a recent afternoon. "It took them a lifetime to figure out how to work with oils and the brushes. Now it's being lost."

Cotti (whose last name is Lorango, but who uses his first name only) performs his technique in the tradition of the old master's school of art Saturday at the West Las Vegas Arts Center.

"This is a dying craft," said Cotti, who is planning additional workshops with the city. "It's been replaced by the graphic arts and faster mediums. But this is what I want to hand down."

The 65-year-old artist describes the technique as a way to use oil and long, thin-handled brushes of varying thickness to create portraits that seem to light up from within the painting itself.

His method uses a minimal palette of colors and a blending technique with dry and wet brushes.

Three colors can create a larger, complementary palette, Cotti said. For instance, a mixture of yellow and green can make a delicate seafoam blue with a soft brush, or a brooding skyscape with the heavy strokes of a thick brush.

Bill Rankin, the senior graphic artist with the Department of Information Technology for the city of Las Vegas, has dabbled in oil painting since the early '70s.

He had put the medium aside until this past fall when he began to work with Cotti, who offers lessons at his studio.

"I used to get mud when I mixed my colors. It was frustrating," Rankin said. "With a simple palette, three basic tones, I don't have to worry about blending. I just get the shape on canvas and wonderful things start to happen."

A blank canvas used to intimidate him.

"Cotti took that away very quickly," Rankin said. "You just get started and mold your mistakes into the painting."

Margaret DeClerk, a graphic artist for the city of Las Vegas Leisure Services and Cultural Division, has been a student of Cotti's since September.

She has a degree in fine arts, but no formal education in the use of oil paint.

"I hate to call myself an artist and not have any oil-painting experience," DeClerk said. "I love the results I can get from watching his demonstrations. That's what sold me on it."

With Cotti's counsel, she said she has finally grasped how to use the paint brushes' thick or pointed tips to create a vivid portrait.

"As I learn this technique, I get more detail, more lifelike movement and depth" in her paintings, DeClerk said.

Cotti had struggled with the techniques of oil painting as a young artist in the late '40s in Los Angeles. He studied the classical methods that masters of the Renaissance created in the 1600s.

"Oil is difficult, if you don't know how to (use) it," he said. "It has worked well for me."

As a boy, Cotti received a scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he learned the basics of painting. Oil painting eluded him, he said, until he mastered the old-school techniques he continues to practice today.

In 1950, at age 15, Cotti was mesmerized by actress Baker as he watched her perform in lavish dresses onstage in Los Angeles. As an aspiring artist, he felt the need to capture her on canvas.

A year later his family urged him to show Baker his finished portraits, which the shy, young boy reluctantly did.

"She couldn't believe that I had done these paintings of her," Cotti said.

Baker used her celebrity clout to further Cotti's career, but duty called him away from the limelight. He was drafted to the Army to fight in Korea in the late '50s.

When he returned to art in the early '60s, he started over in Hollywood.

His work was praised and collected by Sammy Davis Jr., Eartha Kitt, Johnny Mathis and Dietrich, Cotti said. He painted their portraits, and his name began to be whispered in celebrity circles as an up-and-coming artist.

His career continued to rise with the aid of stars.

In the early '70s Welles flew Cotti to Paris for six months to paint his portrait, a time Cotti remembers as heady with art.

He relocated to London in 1986 when he was commissioned by haute couture designer, Peter Golding, to paint a series of portraits.

Cotti's ailing mother called him home to Los Angeles in 1987. He continued to paint commissioned portraits in the Southwest and moved to Las Vegas in 1999 to be close to his sister, Margie Cadiente, who has lived here for 10 years and is an oil-painting artist.

Cotti continues to produce commissioned works, and to teach the Renaissance method of painting.

"I don't think (painters) understand what goes into this," he said. "That's what I want to do, to share this with whoever wants to learn. It's a beautiful thing to discover."