Gadi Veneziano ran his hands over a painting.

“The texture is what makes it. It’s how I express myself,” he said.

He stood in front of a three-foot-wide painting of spinning colors, glistening as if still wet.

Inch-thick mountains of paint stretched the length of other canvases creating peaks and valleys.

Veneziano uses texture to set his paintings apart from others. “It creates more depth and gives the viewer something more than just two dimensions to look at,” he said.

Last Saturday, Veneziano unveiled several new works during a reception at Perks Coffee in Temecula.

Veneziano’s palate includes not only paint but eggshells, shattered glass, tissue paper, sand and clay.

Physical depth allows him to express greater emotional and symbolic depth, he said.

“All my art comes from experiences in life, and my pain,” he said.

He went to a small painting of stark lines set in stiff order over faint, freely swimming color.

He mixed broken glass into his paint when he made that image, called “Shattered Silence.”

“These lines represent a window you’re looking out of,” he said. “You try to reach outside but you feel trapped.”

Veneziano’s constant feeling of being trapped has driven him all over the world. He was born in Israel, passed his teenaged years in Italy and lived in Colorado and Alaska before coming to Southern California. He currently lives in Carlsbad.

Some of his paintings were inspired by his travels. He painted a small canvas, titled “Mount Sinai at Dawn,” after sleeping in the garden of a monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt.

The nuns at the monastery let him camp there for the night, and when he awoke the next morning he found the sun rising.

“It was this,” he said, waving his hands over his painting. “It flowed and it glossed and if I could see the heavens – if I could see what is behind it all – that would have been it. It smashed me in the face like a Louisville slugger.”

Some of his paintings are an attempt to remind him of his identity. “David Italiano” depicts a blue Star of David on a painting of mingling red, white and green, the national colors of Italy.

Veneziano’s strength is finding the beauty in ugly situations, he said. His painting “San Diego Burning” exemplifies this.

Last summer he painted it as he watched trees on a distant hill burn, he said. He thought of the people who were losing their homes and made the painting as a tribute to and an expression of those people’s hardship.

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