If you live in Northern Ontario, chances are you’ve seen Sudbury artist John Stopciati’s work hanging on the walls of businesses and people’s homes.
Working in a variety of media, including watercolours, oils, acrylics and pastels, Stopciati depicts Northern Ontario scenes “without using an artistic licence,” as he puts it - his paintings are so detailed, they’re almost like photographs in their realism.
But if you’d like to visit Stopciati Gallery and Custom Framing on Applegrove Street, located close to the Sudbury Courthouse, time is running out.
Stopciati, who turns 80 next year, said he’s closing his gallery at the end of 2025, consolidating his art activities at his home studio and putting some of his art into storage.
While his originals and reproductions will still be available for purchase through his website, he will be ceasing his framing business entirely.
Stopciati said the economy isn’t currently great for artists, and he’ll be able to spend more time painting if he’s not at his gallery, which opened 38 years ago in Copper Cliff, moving first to Lorne Street and then the Applegrove building, which he owns.
Much like Manitoulin Island’s Ivan Wheale, a respected Northern Ontario landscape artist who painted up to the end before passing away this year at age 90, Stopciati said he’ll also always be an artist.
“That's the way I'm going to go,” he said emphatically. “There's no retirement. My studio is all set up. It always has been. It's just I haven't been attending to it as much as I should have, and this move of shutting this location down is going to permit me to do that.”
Stopciati, who goes by John but whose first name is actually Giovanni, came to Canada from Italy with his parents at the age of five, and grew up in Creighton Mine, a mining community close to Lively that’s now a ghost town.
He was always known among his peers for his artistic abilities, and when he was in Grade 8, he won a scholarship that allowed him to attend a painting course at the Sudbury library. “I sort of got into oil painting then,” Stopciati said.
But becoming a full-time artist was many years away, as he worked his way up in the grocery store industry, from parcel boy to manager in Toronto by age 22, eventually moving back to Sudbury to open and manage grocery stores in the South End and Chelmsford.
“I was burning the midnight oil at home in the studio, painting at night until midnight, going into work, back and forth,” said Stopciati.
After spending 23 years in the grocery biz, and finally getting tired of “babysitting 150 kids,” referring to his mostly youthful part-time employees, he decided to walk away and “start from scratch,” opening his gallery.
While he has progressed in his artistic techniques over the years, Stopciati said he’s amazed that when people look at his paintings from 50 years ago, they ask him if it’s new work.
Besides the Northern Ontario scenery so iconic in his paintings, other notable works include a collection of 15 pieces depicting pow-wow dancers in Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory on Manitoulin Island.
Because the pieces were created a good quarter-century ago, between 1999 and 2002, some of the dancers he painted have now passed on.
Stopciati said his attention to realistic detail was especially important in those pieces.
“If you don't get it correct, they'll come and tell you, because every piece they have is significant,” he said, adding that often, pieces in dancers’ regalia have sentimental value, including having inherited it from family members.
Stopciati said he wants to thank everyone who has supported his gallery over the years, and invites people to come check his large collection of originals and reproductions out before it closes.
The gallery is located at 153 Applegrove St. His current hours of operation are Tuesday to Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. You can contact Stopciati through his website, www.johnstopciati.com.
Heidi Ulrichsen is Sudbury.com’s assistant editor. She also covers education and the arts scene.