rom Paul Cava's "Table Top" series, which is one of three series, along with his "Still Life" and his "Flora" series, making up a larger body of work produced between the years 2019-2021. The leading actor in this three-part drama is the late afternoon light with the supporting cast being the objects of his attention -- a deer antler, a dying flower, plaster casts of his daughter’s hand and foot, the various vessels and forms in relation to each other as the light moves across their surfaces. The elephant in the room for the latter work is the lockdown mood that intensifies and thickens the air in these still lifes. 

Brooklyn-born artist Paul Cava began his career as an artist in the late 1960's. Cava made his first explorations as a poet, multi-media artist, filmmaker, photographer and painter. He finally settled in the last three decades on a hybrid form of expression that synthesized his previous efforts and anticipated the current digital use of photography by combining photographs, words, collage, drawing, painting, and printmaking into his own visual language, the core of which is a personal visual poetry.

Cava has exhibited paintings, drawings and photo-based works from 1976 to the present in galleries and museums in the United States and Europe. His work has been collected by a broad range of private and public institutions, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Princeton University Museum of Art, and The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. His work has been featured in many publications including "Eyemazing Magazine" and "Das Magazin." Cava was a recipient of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grants in 1981 and 1999. In 2005, the German publisher Edition Galerie Vevais released "Walt Whitman and Paul Cava / Children of Adam," a deluxe volume of Cava’s photo-based art and Walt Whitman’s poetry. The artist’s second book, "Paul Cava: Photographs Collages Montages" covers mostly previously unpublished photographs, collages and montages made between the years 1979-2019.