Constance Lapalombara

February 14, 2023

Constance Bezer LaPalombara, 87, died February 14, 2023, at The Whitney Center, Hamden, CT. Born December 13, 1935, to Florence Escobar Bezer and Charles Arthur Bezer, she grew up on Long Island and attended high school at the Sacred Heart Academy. She had one brother, Lawrence Fuller, who predeceased her. Constance earned a BA in Political Science from Manhattanville College in 1957 and worked for the CIA in Washington, DC, in the early 1960s. She later worked for The Russian Institute at Columbia University, where she became assistant administrator, a position she held until 1970. Constance showed a talent for painting at a very young age, but it wasn’t until later in life that she decided to pursue this as a career. In the early 1970s, she studied with William Bailey and Andrew Forge, among others, at the Yale School of Art, and in 1980 she enrolled in the MFA painting program at The Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Constance spent the first year of her graduate program in Rome, Italy, a country she later returned to on an annual basis to paint in the countryside of Umbria and Tuscany. She completed her studies in Philadelphia and graduated with an MFA in painting in 1982. Working primarily in oils, Constance was a landscape and still-life painter who painted from direct observation. Her landscapes mainly focused on urban New Haven and coastal Maine. She spent considerable time painting in Italy, which was an important influence in her work. Light and color are the heart of her work, and in her paintings, she portrays a sense of place that speaks beyond the physicality of the paint. Among her favorite painters who influenced her work are Edward Hopper, John Baptiste Corot, and Giorgio Morandi. Constance’s paintings were featured in one-woman and group exhibitions in New York, Connecticut, Maine, and Rome, Italy. Her paintings are in public collections in many places, including New Haven Paint and Clay Club Permanent Collection, New Britain Museum of American Art, Enichem USA, New Haven Public Library, Smilow Cancer Center, Yale-New Haven Hospital, Wachovia Bank, New Haven, Banca Commerciale Italiana, New York, NY, and Italiana Gas Industriale, Milan, Italy.

Since the 1970s, Constance divided her year between Connecticut and Maine, where she spent her summers from the 1970s until last year. She loved the beauty and serenity of Downeast Maine, where she painted stunning landscapes, swam in the ocean, walked and kayaked with friends and family, and took away more than her fair share of first-place titles in singles and doubles tennis competitions at The Causeway Club of Southwest Harbor. Constance is survived by her husband of fifty-one years and the love of her life, Joseph “Gufo” LaPalombara; her three stepchildren Richard LaPalombara (Carol Ann Phelps), David LaPalombara (Robin Webb), and Susan LaPalombara (Marc Frohman); her four treasured granddaughters Paia LaPalombara (Lee Schott), Alicia LaPalombara (Zachary Ciccone), Zoe LaPalombara (Michael Poznansky), and Hannah LaPalombara; and her three great-grandchildren Rowan and Lane Schott, and Solomon LaPalombara Ciccone. She was a petite woman who filled any space with strength, personality, intelligence, and humor. She will be missed terribly by her loving family and friends but will remain with us in memory and the beautiful paintings she left behind. In lieu of flowers, gifts may be made in her memory to Creative Arts Workshop, New Haven, CT or The National Audubon Society.