Paul Pascarella was born in Emerson, New Jersey. An artist from childhood, in his teenage years he did custom paintwork on cars and advertising signs; before he was out of art school his work had been exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York, and the Nikon Gallery, New York, and accepted into the contemporary collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. After graduating from Parsons School of Design, New York, he worked as a freelance graphic designer. In 1968 he went for the first time to Aspen, Colorado. There he began painting on leather, and in 1974 he had his first one-man show at the Jerome Gallery in Aspen. During the next decade Pascarella alternated between creating original artwork in Aspen and commercial graphic design in New York and Los Angeles. He did extensive design work on films . In the early 1980’s, Pascarella worked mainly with dry pulverized materials such as pigments, charcoal, and pastels, creating pictures of buffaloes, storms, windswept prairies, and archetypal birds of prey that hearkened back to a pre- industrialized America. The pictures inspired a friend to introduce him to Native American Lakota rituals. These intense spiritual explorations drew him away from the film industry towards an exclusive concentration on painting. Having originally been drawn to spiritual work through his art, Pascarella began to make pieces, which reflected his spiritual quest. These paintings were shown for the first time in 1983 at the Smith Stewart Gallery in Santa Fe. The landscape of northern New Mexico, where he has lived since the 1980s, influenced his choice of nature as subject matter, leading to the “Dynamics of Nature” series and the “Full Moon” paintings, oils on gessoed wood panels made on the day of each full moon from February 1997 through February 1998. The Kimono paintings, in which the kimono represents an abstracted human figure containing images of dynamic nature within its boundaries, were painted after Pascarella suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1997. In the last decade Pascarella has had shows at various galleries in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Aspen, Santa Fe, and Taos. His work is in several museums including the Harwood Museum in Taos, the Hammond Museum in New York, and the Headley – Whitney Museum in Lexington, Kentucky