Dear Old School Days

H. Hargrove was born in 1941 in Southern Italy. He came to America in 1964 after having earned a degree in wine chemistry at the Institute of Wine Technology in Marsala, Italy. His first employment in this country was with a winery in upstate New York. Although happy with his job, H. Hargrove rekindled his life long love for art when he saw the opportunity to decorate the wine tasting room with paintings. These paintings, appropriately so, portrayed monks making and testing wine in medieval tradition, immediately becoming the delight of the crowds touring the winery. 

This amazing artist also fell in love with the farmland and farm life of the American countryside, which he found so close to his heart, having himself grown up on a farm in Italy. In 1968, H. Hargrove finally made the decision to embark in an art career without any formal art training, armed exclusively with the desire to paint American barns and American nostalgia.

Although the beginning was difficult and unrewarding, H. Hargrove had the inner drive not to be discouraged continue with his work. He felt at that point that it was necessary to adopt an American pen name he found more fitting to the nature of his work, although remaining very proud of his Italian heritage. Slowly his work became accepted more and more, making it necessary for him to experiment with silkscreening to satisfy the ever increasing demand. 

With no formal training in silkscreening and by experimenting, he developed a very unusual way to use it H. Hargrove applies up to thirty colors to his canvas, and interestingly enough, he does not know what his finished product will look like until the final coating. Well known American Artists upon studying his work said of his technique, “He paints with silkscreening.” With his vast variety of subjects that range from his original barns to every aspect of early American life, he has captured the hearts and imagination of people everywhere.