Duane Park Patisserie is hosting a show of the paintings of the late Stephen Grillo, a longtime Tribecan, painter and musician — and it’s worth a visit. Titled “Brushstrokes on Duane,” the show includes paintings Stephen did of the Washington Market Park gazebo, the Mercantile Exchange tower, and other neighborhood haunts in the 1970s and 1980s.

“It’s been a sad/happy event,” said his wife, Jean Grillo. Stephen died at age 85 in May 2024. The show is up till December 5.

Stephen was born and raised in Providence and would go on to get an MFA in fine arts from Boston University in 1971. He also attended Berklee School of Music and Boston Conservatory, playing clarinet and alto saxophone, and played in the Rhode Island National Guard 88th Army Band.

In 1972, he and Jean, a writer and playwright, moved into a loft in a neighborhood barely known then as Tribeca; they raised their family here and live in the loft to this day.

Stephen was a professor and artist-in-residence at universities around the country, including Brandeis, UC Santa Barbara and Westminster College. He was the art director of the Westchester Music and Arts Camp, an English and social studies teacher in Rhode Island, and maintained a 30+ year career as a graphic artist at design houses around the city.

A member of the Artist’s Choice Museum, he has had work in group and solo shows at galleries around the city, including The Bowery Gallery, The Queens Museum and The James Joyce Finnegan’s Wake Society.

All of the works at Duane Park Patisserie were painted in Tribeca and in addition to the neighborhood, feature the Soho loft jazz movement, specifically Ali’s Alley, where John Coltrane’s drummer, Rashid Ali, set up an illegal jazz club in his loft. Some of the bar scenes are of the famous Mare Chiaro, now called the Mulberry Street Bar, which was also an artist spot to be “seen” in the ’60s and ’70s.

“My father was painting in his loft up until a month before he died,” said his daughter Aria Grillo, who put the show together as a way to honor him. “It’s incredible to me that this loft space was utilized as a true artist loft from 1972 until 2024 for him and my mother, who is actively writing. I am so proud of both of them and the life they allowed me to have in Tribeca.”

A favorite saying of Stephen’s: “ars longa, vita brevis” — art is long, life is short.