Dan's Papers - April 11, 2008

Stranger things have happened to Jo-Ann Corretti. Nonetheless, when she was contacted at the end of last year by Dan Perdomo, what transpired threw her for a loop.

Perdomo, who resides in Rocks Springs, Florida, had recently bought one of her paintings-one that was stolen 25 years ago-at an estate sale. Since it was signed, he knew it was Coretti's. "I was getting all these emails for orders around Christmas time, and all of a sudden this came up, with a photo of the painting in the e-mail. I was in shock, like I was seeing a ghost."

The painting, acrylic on canvas, depicts the Northport dock, where the Corettis were living at the time. After an exhibit of her work at the Crab Meadow Golf Club in Northport, this one painting was maintained, finding a spot in one of the rooms between the pro shop and the restaurant. "I came in one day and the painting was gone," tells Coretti. As anyone would be, she was quite upset, and immediately asked around to garner any information she could: nothing. She went to The Northport Observer in an attempt to publicize the story and possibly retrieve the work. After persisting for a month, Coretti gradually ceased her search and forgot about it, especially as the years passed. She didn't contact the local police out of respect for the privacy of the Club and its membership.

But after the curious, and more or less affable e-mail from Perdomo, Coretti remembered, and was understandably elated. "I called my husband and was stuttering on the phone. Who would have thought that the picture would come back to me this way?"

Perdomo had first sent an e-mail saying he had this painting and would like to have some information on it, searching on the web for Coretti and landing upon her site. "He first asked if it was mine and if I could send him a picture," she says of the initial e-mail, just an inquiry without a photo of the work. Coretti admits that she didn't really know if it was hers. "I emailed him back, just wanting to get information about which estate sale he got it from. He didn't really remember, only saying that the woman at the estate sale really didn't want to sell it, but that he eventually got her to come around. "Of course I eventually sent him a photo."

Getting in touch was also to see about any real value the painting might hold (a 24" x 36" work of Coretti's typically starts at around $3,500). Perdomo never imparted how much he paid for it; Coretti never asked. "It's got to be worth what my paintings are worth now." Perdomo had it displayed on his wall and told Coretti that his brother had looked at it one day and remarked that it was Northport, clearly the dock there. They were from Fort Salonga, a part of Northport proper, but had moved to Florida when they were children.

Coretti paints a lot of East End scenes, classifying herself as a Long Island painter. The painting meant a lot, mostly because it was 25 years ago and she's been painting for 25 years (Coretti now has many collectors and much of her work is commissioned). She and her family lived in Northport until moving to Mattituck seven years ago, where they built a house on the Mattituck Inlet. Coretti took pictures from above the dock looking down at the Coastguard ship docked there. "It was an unusual view- a great panoramic view - and I never used a perspective like that again."

Although she makes prints of all of her work, that was the only work that Coretti hadn't.

And now the painting surfaced, over two decades later. "It was kind of like a 'Twilight Zone' episode," says Coretti. "When you do a painting, you're putting your energy into the work." She felt that that energy had made its way back to her.

Friends advised Coretti to try to get the painting back, but she didn't want to. "I was happy that the painting was still around and that it wasn't destroyed - and that it was making someone happy."