When it comes to turning a blank canvas into a true work of art—smatterings of color, depth and emotion coaxed into cohesion by layers of brushstrokes—what’s talent got to do with it? In Adriano Farinella’s mind, not much. “Talent to me is… I hate that word,” he says. “It triggers me a little bit.”
How is it, then, that Farinella, an accomplished artist perhaps best known for his ethereal cloud paintings, can do what he does? “I don’t feel like I’m talented, but I feel like I’m intentional and I feel like I’m dedicated and I’m absolutely in love with creativity,” he explains. “I would approach accounting the same way if I was in love with accounting.”
Lucky for the Lehigh Valley arts community, he didn’t go into the number-crunching business. Farinella the painter is also Farinella the teacher, and he has created something special with the founding of StudioWork, a hub for creative types of all calibers in Downtown Easton.
Farinella grew up in Paterson and Wayne, NJ. “I don’t come from a family of artists, but I come from a family of creative people,” he says. He learned how to play the guitar as a kid and remembers making art the old-fashioned way—crayons and coloring books—during those days when the Internet wasn’t yet omnipresent and young artists were still sketching more on paper tablets than the electronic kind.
Farinella earned his BFA in painting and drawing from Kutztown University in 1998, but plans to further his education at Italy’s Florence Academy of Art didn’t pan out. He knew he had to get a job to pay the bills, so he accepted a position as an art buyer for children’s history books. “I was good at the work, and I loved learning this new thing and I loved being a part of it, but it’s not where I belonged, and I knew it wasn’t where I belonged,” Farinella says.
By then he was living in Allentown, and the commute from there to northern New Jersey every day zapped his energy and ambition to pick up a paintbrush in his down time. He was laid off in 2001, but a valuable lesson had been learned: “I swore I would never do anything I didn’t love for a living.”
Farinella pivoted to massage therapy, which allowed him to make a living while getting reacquainted with his artistic side. In 2003 he began teaching figure drawing at Bethlehem’s Banana Factory, where he procured his own studio space.
Later, and by then living in Easton, he was sharing a studio with another artist inside the Karl Stirner Easton Arts Building.
Then, while on the hunt for a new apartment in Easton, Farinella came across the Zillow listing that would change his life. The three-story brick building on North Sitgreaves Street had everything he wanted: living space, gallery space and studio space for himself and for instruction. At the time, a dance studio was occupying the lower levels of the building. Farinella wasn’t put off by the décor: yellow walls, dance bars, boxes upon boxes of old costumes, tutus and shoes. He likens his initial tour of the property to a true epiphany. “I felt like it downloaded into me,” he says. “I just knew this was my spot.”
He barely slept that night. “I woke up at four o’clock [a.m.] and I wrote a business plan about everything,” Farinella recalls. The name StudioWork came to him and stuck. He laid out parameters for the programming he would offer. One hiccup: the dance studio had a year left on its
lease. So he waited. But in July of 2019, the place was his, and he got right to it with renovations.
Farinella held his first painting workshop in January of 2020. It was a big success, he says, with 16 students from all over the U.S. making the trek to Easton. He was making plans to offer more in the months ahead. But then in early March, a new virus dubbed COVID-19 was becoming a regular mention in the daily news cycle. “I wrote everyone an email, saying maybe we should just take two weeks off, see what happens, we’ll take it from there,” Farinella says. “Then all of a sudden I was refunding a semester of classes to everyone.”
Once it became apparent that COVID-19 was settling in for an extended stay, he had to figure out how to shift everything online. But a standard “how-to” video—one static shot of an artist at an easel—wouldn’t do. He started building the tech infrastructure himself with an iPad, an iPhone and a MacBook. Eventually it became a three-camera operation that Farinella films, narrates and edits. “It’s not just a Zoom class,” he says. “It’s like a TV show. We can all feel like we’re in the same studio, but we’re literally all over the world.” There are group critiques, one-on-one time, live demonstrations and lessons on the fundamentals.
StudioWork currently offers a slate of both online and in-person classes, with the most popular being the Sky & Clouds & Land & Air workshop, taught on-site and virtually. “It’s not a cloud-painting class,” Farinella says. “It’s a vehicle to teach painting and landscape painting and to balance intuitive and analytical in painting and in process.”
Years ago, studying and painting clouds helped Farinella achieve his own breakthrough. Initially trained as a figure painter, he struggled with landscape painting. He took workshops in Italy on plein air painting. “I was horrible at it,” says Farinella. “I had no idea what I was doing. It’s overwhelming when you’re sitting outside to paint, and if you’re sitting outside in the hills of Tuscany, you’re overwhelmed with beauty and light that feels like it’s from another world. You have no idea how to translate that into paint.”
But he dedicated himself to getting better. After he came home, he tried painting from photographs, and then memory.
Clouds and skyscapes emerged as common subject matter, and they became symbolic of a variety of themes: the passage of time, impermanence, the metaphysical world. Perhaps more importantly, Farinella began to find his groove in that space. “I felt so free just painting and figuring it out as I went,” he says.
Farinella, who also currently teaches at Moravian University and has previously taught at other local colleges as well as Allentown’s Baum School of Art, has a lengthy list of solo and group exhibits to his credit. He also has sold his paintings to collectors all over the world, and has created dozens of commissioned works for private, public and corporate collections.
Even though the demands of running StudioWork (and there are many—“I’m the everything of this,” he says) cut into the time Farinella has to work on his own paintings, he’s committed to expanding the array of offerings there. He’s introducing a visiting artist series to bring in locally and nationally recognized talent for workshops and residencies. In the fall, he plans on debuting a Plein Air Collective that will feature a weekly plein air class in three Easton locations: downtown, the historic cemetery and on the banks of the Lehigh and Delaware rivers.
Farinella stresses that novices shouldn’t be shy about signing up for one of his classes. He’s worked with everyone from newbies to weekend warriors to practicing artists. “When artists of any skill level devote time to practicing and strengthening their foundational skills, they unlock the freedom to create anything they imagine,” he says. “Doing so within a supportive studio environment, alongside peers who share the same passion, enhances the creative process while providing accountability and connection. At its core, all StudioWork programming is dedicated to achieving a balance between technical mastery and the ongoing effort required to sustain a meaningful, creative practice.”
Above all, beyond a perfectly rendered sunset, or a landscape so luminescent it’s breathtaking, or a cumulus cloud that looks ready to float right off the canvas, Farinella prizes the community he is creating and the connection he makes with his students. “Even if I was a billionaire, I would still teach,” he says. “This is my dream. This is everything.”
Published as “At Home and In the Studio with Adriano Farinella: The Easton Artist Reflects on His Work and the Community He's Creating” in the May 2025 edition of Lehigh Valley Style magazine.
