Masoli comes alive, on canvas
Ancaster artist Dino Nicosia to present painting to Ticats quarterback Saturday
Dino Nicosia is working on a comeback.
After a three-decade hiatus, the local artist is painting again and pays homage to Jeremiah Masoli in his latest portrait — an acrylic on canvas rendering of the Hamilton Tiger-Cats quarterback scrambling with the ball.
He plans to present it to the pivot after the team’s walkthrough at Tim Hortons Field Saturday.
“I had a business, real estate, so I didn’t do many paintings over the past 30 years, and now I’m getting back into it,” he said. “The adrenalin, the excitement and I still have it!”
Nicosia, 68, was born in Sicily and immigrated to Hamilton with his family when he was seven. He started painting as a teen.
“My aunt, she saw that I was always scribbling and sketching with a pencil, so she took a chance and bought me some paint and some pastels and I taught myself,” he said. “Just trial and error, trial and error, and before you know it, by the time I was 22 years old, it was ‘wow.’ ”
Around the same time, the longtime Tiger-Cats fan and season-ticket holder started to paint local athletes. Guys such as Garney Henley, Tom Clements and Dale McCourt, when the Fincups won the 1976 Memorial Cup.
Portraits are his specialty. “I also do landscapes, still lifes, but my passion is portraits with pastels,” he said. And he painted
hundreds of them in the 1970s and ’80s before he left his government job to grow his realty company and was forced to put his passion aside.
“Stopped cold turkey,” he explained. The hours were crazy and “I just didn’t have time.”
Then, about a decade ago, Nicosia began to scale back his workload and ease into semi-retirement. His kids prodded him to pick up his paintbrush again. He complied.
He started by reproducing a few photos from their travels — an Italian column, the Portuguese coast, an Irish seascape. And then, Masoli — an idea that came from his son, Steve.
“He said, ‘you’ve done paintings for me, you’ve done paintings for my sister, I think you should do it again,’ ” he said. “So he prompted this.”
Nicosia, who works out of a basement studio in his Ancaster home, started on the piece a little more than a week ago, as soon the Tiger-Cats announced Masoli — who set a number of personal benchmarks this season — as their nominee for most outstanding player. It was a big effort.
“Normally, I’d work two, three hours a day, and it would take me two or three weeks, but because we had that time constraint,” he said,
“I was working about six, seven hours a day.”
When he learned about the painting, Masoli — who has yet to see the finished product — was grateful. “That’s awesome,” he said. “I’ve never been painted before, so that’s a first. Thanks so much.”
Matt Afinec echoed his QB. “We want to thank Dino for the wonderful gift for Jeremiah that signifies the career season our most outstanding player has had,” said the Tiger-Cats president and COO. “Passionate fans like Dino show how much our team means to our community, and how much our community means to our team. We’re honoured that he took the time to do this for one of our players.”
For Nicosia, though, it was about more than honouring Masoli or his record-setting season. It was about reigniting his passion for painting and the adrenalin rush that comes with staring a blank canvas — sort of like an athlete who rediscovers a love for his sport.
“I’m just getting back into it,” he said, “but, I promise you now, there will be more.”