Michael Pontieri finds fertile scenes in his mind.

Michael Pontieri takes a casual approach to describing his painting style.

He doesn’t care for art lingo, and playfully tosses terms around as he sees fit.

“It’s easier to say, ‘I paint pictures of people in different scenes, different places,’” Pontieri said, “but maybe you could call it Socialist Rococo Realism.”

All three styles have influenced his art.

The Realist aesthetic informs Pontieri’s work, but not in the way he handles paint. He appreciates the Rococo and French Classical artists Watteau and Poussin whom he fondly refers to as the “flying baby painters.”

For the month of October, Gallery Fraga exhibits nine of Pontieri’s acrylic paintings. While common threads are interwoven throughout the works, Pontieri did not intend for the paintings to be viewed as a series. Each has its own story; each is the product of multiple images and sources of inspiration.

“You can have a painting about one thing, but there are always other things protruding in,” he said.

Pontieri’s art combines the old and the new, the real and the imaginary. It is infused with both mythology and history. The artist pulls ideas from looking out his window, watching movies, revisiting old photographs of friends, and watching his daughter at play.

He holds onto an image that sticks in his memory after reading a novel, even if he thought the writing left something to be desired.

“I replay it in my mind again and again, then I make a thumbnail sketch and work it from there,” he said.

Dreams have had a profound effect on Pontieri’s work. Eighteen years ago, he dreamt of a beautiful, peaceful Romanesque city over which he floated, and to which he returned in recurring dreams.

Years after the first dream, Pontieri traveled through Italy, and realized that Naples, his grandmother’s birthplace, bore a striking resemblance to the dream city. Imagery from Naples and Pontieri’s dream utopia became the backdrop for many paintings, a scene to which he is still faithful in his most recent work.

Pontieri also stays true to the people whom he places in his paintings, partly because they provide him with inspiration, partly because he does not have many new models.

His wife, Ursula, their young daughter, Lucia, close friends from school, and cousins have all repeatedly shown up. Pontieri himself makes a cameo appearance on many of his canvases.

Although several of his paintings are like portraits, depicting one figure standing or sitting quietly against the backdrop, Pontieri’s interest lies more in group scenarios. He likes to convey interplay between people, usually in a relaxed picnic setting, with elements of the dream city surrounding the picnic party.

Not surprisingly, he does not place a lot of stock in formal art education. By the time he registered for art classes at Evergreen State College, he had already felt the gravitation toward his own painting style.

Pontieri “developed kernels” at school, but his classes did not heavily influence his artwork. He does, however, hold onto memories of one former teacher, Ken Hinton, whom he compares to Cosmo Spacely from “The Jetsons.”

“It would be hard to say whether he would like my style now,” he said, “but he had a gentle way of teaching – good pointers, without telling me what to do.”

Pontierei didn’t adopt Hinton’s preference for Abstract Expressionism, the spontaneous, non-representational school that came to prominence after World War II, but still is grounded in Hinton’s methods of building up layers of paint, and working organically.

Nowadays, Pontieri looks after Lucia while his wife teaches elementary school. He paints in his studio while his daughter naps, and he returns to the studio at night after the household goes to bed. He lives on property that has been in his wife’s family since 1910.

Inside their house, Lucia’s toys pepper the floor. A whimsical pink unicorn suggests that she already shares her father’s interest in mythology. Their shared preferences extend to artists also.

“She likes Picasso and Watteau, and that’s it,” Pontieri said.

The view from the picture window in his living room offers more inspiration – water, the beach, and Keyport are all returning themes in Pontieri’s work. At the park down the street, he snaps photos of birds, and later paints their images into the skies that blanket his utopian picnic scenarios.

He does the same with people, piecing one communal scene together from various old photographs, but painting the background from his imagination. Friends and family who have never even met one another can sit side by side, enjoying a picnic.

“A lot of my paintings are set in an alternate universe – it is not quite here,” Pontieri said.

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Alternate universe

Michael Pontieri’s paintings are on exhibit Oct. 6 to 28 at Gallery Fraga. The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 5 p.m. Call 842-1150 or see www.galleryfraga.com.