He was born July 4, 1917, the elder of three sons to Sicilian immigrant parents, in the small industrial town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. The 1930’s brought the family to Hartford, Connecticut where as a child growing up his first influences were felt, since his Father painted and sculpted. John would frequent the Wadsworth Antheneum Museum in Hartford where the collection of portraits would inspire him to become a portrait painter. In 1935 he enrolled in the Hartford School of Fine Arts where he learned portrait and landscape painting. He painted the poor and the working class and in 1939 he painted a large mural depicting a family of three sitting at a dining table with no food on their plates (based possibly on a lithograph by Daumier). During this period his major interests included the “Ashcan School”, Luks, Robert Henri, Thomas Hart Benton and Reginald Marsh, together with the works of the old masters.

During World War II, in 1944, Grillo enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Okinawa in the South Pacific where he continued to paint landscapes and scenes of life in the service. At that time he was inspired by a reproduction of Robert Motherwell’s collage, “Pancho Villa”. This soon led to his flowing and spontaneous abstractions, some of which were included in a post- war exhibition entitled, “Soldier Art” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

Grillo arrived in San Francisco at the war’s end in 1946 and enrolled in the San Francisco School of Fine Arts under the G.I. Bill. Douglas MacAgy, the director remembered Grillo as that “fiery young sailor”and gave him a studio and a lot of free reign. In Susan Landauer’s, “John Grillo, the San Francisco Years. Art of California”, May 1990: “Short on art supplies, Grillo used whatever was at hand. He threw cocoa and coffee grounds on sheets of paper to make speckled abstract patterns, tying the compositions together with washes and linear designs”

Grillo’s first influences in this period included: Miro, Henry Moore, Mondrian, Picasso, Mark Rothko, Motherwell and Gottlieb’s pictographs. In the summer of 1947, he studied with Rothko and amassed a sizable amount of work. He then was given his first one-man show at the Daliel Gallery in Berkeley and received the Samuel S. Bender Award for painting, the funds of which enabled him to continue painting at the school. continued >>

The Funeral, 1943
Oil on Canvas 25X30

Untitled, 1947
Watercolor on Paper 18X23.5