“I See Something and I Want to Capture It.”

For Traeger di Pietro, creating is, at its most basic impulse, a way of seeing. “[And] I’ve always seen the world a little differently from people around me.”

 “I love life—shadows, light, people,” he says, but everything he comes across is fair game for his imagination; the sort of impressions one can get from just riding in a car and noticing what passes by--the way the light reflects off a window or off spilled gas in the road--give him inspiration.

He mentions a recent trip to LA—he saw no movie stars, but he was “fascinated by the sidewalks” because the patterns of pebbles and wads of gum were endlessly eye-catching.

The results of di Pietro’s observations are a wide variety of vivid paintings, mostly done in oil or mixed media. Locally, you can see them hanging in the Blue Ox Restaurant, on Oxford Street in Lynn, or in the virtual gallery of his website www.traegerdipietro.com

 A resident of Martha’s Vineyard for over a decade now, di Pietro grew up in Swampscott; his family roots are here. Some may remember him as a baseball and football standout athlete for Big Blue, and in fact, after high school, he started out at UNH playing baseball.

Art had, however, the stronger hold on him, and he transferred to U Maine Orono, where he majored in Studio Art.

 He credits growing up in a household where his father was a carpenter and his mother turned whatever she lay her hands on into something you’d want to look at; “she could go to the beach, come home with a frying pan and hang it on the wall,” and it would look like it belonged there.

Also, injuring his wrist while a junior in high school turned into a lucky break; out for the sports season, he “painted his cast” and then “started just painting,” setting in motion what would turn out to be a career.

One of his favorite subjects is people who earn their living from the sea. A visit to his website turns up a variety of beautiful, impressionistic pieces of fishermen and boats. Di Pietro credits his Swamspcott upbringing for this.

He remembers as a child watching his neighbor, a lobsterman, get ready for work. “I used to watch him put the traps in the truck.”

Although the figures are fishermen, these pictures are “about everyone who works hard to make ends meet … people who support their families.” He wants to paint what “goes on behind the scenes” of everyday life. Many of his figures don’t have particular faces because “they could be anyone.”

Another line of work moves in a conceptual direction. For example, his mixed media (oil and newspaper on board) piece entitled “Two-Faced or Blue in the Face,” which can be found on his website and just got sold to a buyer in Swampscott, is about family conspiracies. In it are three women, one of whom has a blue face and is seated somewhat apart. Although he used his own family—mother, aunt and grandmother as inspirations for the figures, the figures are universal because we all “make the same mistakes” and “have the same emotions.”

If the artist’s job is to show us our world, it’s a duty that Traeger di Pietro shoulders willingly. “I love people,” he says. “Isn’t that what it’s all about?”