Brewster Artist’s Blacklight Paintings Light Up Chappaqua Library

By Rin Fenster

Tom Bisogno remembers sitting in the halls at Purchase College in the 1980s, staring at two centuries of paint layered on the old walls. One day, he looked up and suddenly saw a Japanese garden forming in his mind.

“I took my pencil and I started trying to make it,” Bisogno recalled in a recent interview with The Examiner. “And I messed it up. But that’s when I realized that what you see could be just from 200 years of process.”

That same ability to see what others might miss defined his solo exhibit, Vespertine Spectrum, originally scheduled to run at the Chappaqua Library from July 15 to Aug. 15, though it was still on view for visitors to enjoy in recent days. The show features 18 oil paintings that transform under black light, revealing hidden pigments and layers that offer viewers an ever-changing experience.

“Every time you walk by it, you get a new experience,” Bisogno said. “I get excited, I paint them during the daylight. So I don’t even know what they really look like.”

Inside the Exhibit

Bisogno’s work shifts from natural browns and grays to vibrant blues and reds under black light, allowing multiple paintings to exist within a single canvas.

“The more light goes down, you see different paintings,” he said. “The painting comes out. So there’s basically an infinite number of paintings in here. Like, this whole area is changing just as we’re talking.”

The 68-year-old artist first entered the field through computer animation with the company Blue Skies, blending his technical skills with artistic vision. His background in science and technology informs his process, where electrons act like fireflies, lighting up pigments when excited.

“All these pigments are like crystals,” he remarked. “When light hits them, like a mixed light from the sun or a very narrow band of wavelength, like black light, it excites the electrons… they’re excited, they drop down, and they emit…. And that’s the color you see.”

The Artist

Bisogno grew up in Putnam County, where his deep connection to nature continues to influence his work.

“I grew up in the woods,” he noted. “In Brewster. I lived on a dirt road with a reservoir that was my own. We resurrected rowboats that were sunken and that was our fleet, and we went out to the islands… In the end, I’m living in it. And I still live in it. It’s just natural. I don’t even realize it. I’m just there.”

Because nature constantly evolves, Bisogno uses black light to capture the fleeting qualities of the sun, trees, and flowers.

“It also has to do with seasons, like that kind of plant ends,” he said. “And then something ends after that, and then other things end after that. And so I paint what’s gonna die soon. I mean, they’re gonna die, and then the next year, things start growing at different rates… I’m watching harder this season. Before they used to kind of go by, now I’m watching it, like, by the day, seasonal change. And being in tune to it around me. It’s my environment, all these things are in my environment.”

After earning his visual arts degree in 1981, Bisogno returned to Purchase in 1985 for a mathematics degree — a pairing that shaped his distinctive artistic vision. Today, he makes a living as a BLS instructor for the American Heart Association and as a scuba staff instructor with the company PADI, alongside his wife, Rebecca.

He also has three paintings at the Westport Riverside Fine Art Gallery and eight pieces in a semi-permanent display at the Southeast Museum in Brewster.

“The director gave up her office and calls it the blacklight lounge,” Bisogno said.

Though blacklight art is often considered niche, Vespertine Spectrum aims to push beyond novelty.

“Art doesn’t have to be a figure, or a bowl of fruit,” he observed. “It could be layers and layers of trying something. And what you get is that magic of time. And that’s what I do.”