Denise Yorko

Born in Gary, Indiana, 2 days before St. Valentine's Day in 1956, Denise Cifalia Yorko can remember drawing human forms and faces... well, as far back as she can remember.

"I really relate to Salvador Dali's obsession with Venus Paradise colored pencils, having had quite a relationship with them myself." Feeling their soft rich pigments melt onto a sheet of paper may have been her earliest erotic experience with art. "Maybe, like Dali, I subliminally imprinted the nude female form from their label, too... or maybe it was just the influence of my father's lifetime subscription to Playboy."

Denise learned humor and tolerance from her French-born mother, discovered pornography at an early age thanks to her two older brothers, and attended the local campus of Indiana University on a full academic scholarship. She began intensive life drawing classes and then studied painting under New York photorealist Lawrence Kaufman. After earning her B.A. degree in Fine Art in 1977, she married, had 2 children, and moved to the suburbs.

A child of the sixties, by 1980 she had crashed her station wagon, divorced, and moved to Florida on a journey of self-discovery.

20 years and several lifetimes later, she has compiled a body of work along three major themes: First, the large, soft realist and surrealist figure paintings to which she was first compelled and has returned; Second, her 'Body Work', sensual and erotic nude forms in sectional compositions, and her signature 'poetry as art', abstract expressionist paintings/poems in one.