Man overcomes poverty in Italy to realize creative dream in B.C.

COQUITLAM, B.C. -

When he happened upon an online video about his hometown in Italy, Cosimo Geracitano couldn’t have been more surprised.

“I was shocked,” Cosimo says. “I said, ‘That’s me!’”

Cosimo recalls the black and white photo of a sad-looking boy being taken when he was four, but had never seen it until now.

“We were the poorest of the poor,” Cosimo says.

His home was one room shared by four people, with no electricity or running water.

“It was not a happy time for me,” Cosimo says.

So Cosimo started escaping through art, drawing characters from the comic books he couldn’t afford, and painting a ship on the wall that he dreamed of sailing away on.

His talent was recognized by his mom.

“She took my hands on her hands,” Cosimo recalls. “And she said, ‘You have magic hands. You can do anything.”

But no one could have imagined how magic, until after Cosimo left Italy on the real version of the vessel he’d painted, after he created a better life for his family in Canada, and after he retired from a career repairing generators.

“Fifteen years ago, I say, ‘I want to paint again,’” Cosimo says before bursting into a smile.

After decades of virtually nothing, the self-taught artist started painting something every day.

“This was the first painting I did,” Cosimo says, pointing to a large canvas showing a realistic scene of a European town. “And after that, I did more than a hundred (paintings).”

Cosimo begins by his creative process by spending countless hours studying the work of the masters — from Da Vinci to Van Gogh.

“I’m fascinated by their works,” Cosimo says. “I just love them.”

So, driven by the challenge of reproducing them with exacting detail, Cosimo has achieved his artistic goal of being surrounded by their beauty.

“It‘s excitement,” Cosimo says of painting the remarkably accurate replicas. “(It’s) nothing else I’ve experienced in life.”

Cosimo is proving to be so prolific, his work hangs on every wall of every room in his house, and is featured on a few ceilings too.

“I didn’t want to part with them,” Cosimo says. “I didn’t want to sell them.”

The humble painter also didn’t want to tell anybody about them, until his family and friends finally convinced him to start sharing them with the public. Now Cosimo is opening up his home to visitors, hoping to inspire others.

“I say, ‘Keep going. Don’t give up,’” Cosimo says. “Look at me. I had nothing and look what I did. You can do much better.”

As for Cosimo’s most recent original painting, inspired by the picture of his younger self that he found on-line: “I would say, ‘I love you,’” Cosimo says, reaching out his hand to the canvas to stroke the cheek of the boy he once was.

And he would show his younger self all the paintings, to see how his magic hands would one day make all his dreams come true.