Biography

Pavel Kapic was born and raised in Czechoslovakia. He initially studied statistics and management at the Czech Polytechnic in Prague. In 1968, after a brief teaching career at the university and the short-lived Prague Spring, Kapic fled his homeland. After months of uncertainty, he was among the first Czechs and Slovaks to board a Pan Am flight bound for New York, and a new life. Thus began Kapic's journey of reinvention.

With his academic training, Kapic was soon hired as a management consultant, while he also attended Columbia University, earning a Master’s Degree. Despite a demanding schedule, he concurrently pursued his passion for art and attended fine arts classes at Parsons School of Design in New York City.

In the summer of 1974, he traveled for a work-study program to Pietrasanta, a historical town in Tuscany. There, he was exposed to stone-carving in marble yards that had been home to the great sculptors, dating back to Michelangelo. Surrounded by a century-old, stone-carving tradition and encouraged by his Italian mentors, Kapic focused on sculpture. He returned twice to Pietrasanta to apprentice as a carver. It was at this point that he turned his full attention to art.

After returning to New York, he focused on painting at The Art Students League, studying color and composition this time in a two-dimensional space. One of his instructors remarked, "Kapic’s paintings reach deeply into the many colorful layers of his memory in an extraordinarily unique manner."

Over the years Kapic has worked in tempera, watercolor and other media, but his focus has been oil painting. His style can best be described as romantic expressionism; with bold strokes of washes of complementary colors he adds vivid life to his pictures. His textural use of gesso - paint forming fresco-like surfaces - builds added dimension and reflects Kapic’s early training as a sculptor. Art lovers across Europe and the United States now collect Kapic’s work. In recent years his paintings have been exhibited in galleries in Italy, France, the Czech Republic, New York City, Sarasota, FL, Santa Fe, NM, Newport Beach, CA and in Puna, India.

In 2003, Kapic realized one of his dreams. He and his wife Alyssia Lazin, an established art photographer, moved to their 340-year-old restored farmhouse outside Lucca, Italy. When not traveling or painting, he works in his olive orchard and perfects his culinary skills with the produce from their prized vegetable garden.