Macaione belongs to the small but distinct American tradition of the artist as public character, the bohemian, the street-painter, the local eccentric who became inseparable from the visual identity of his city, and his forty years on the streets and Canyon Road of Santa Fe made him the most recognizable figure in the city's mid- to late-twentieth-century art world.
Macaione's early life was conditioned by displacement. The childhood move from Connecticut to Sicily, the wartime stranding of the family in Italy, and his eventual return to New London as a teenager gave him a foundation in Italian culture and visual tradition that few of his American contemporaries had. The early Italian years also opened his interest in painting, which he pursued seriously upon his return through formal study at the Art Students League and the Rhode Island School of Design.
The 1940s were a period of transition. The Army Signal Corps service during the Second World War gave him the discipline and skills he would use for the rest of his life, and the barbering trade he learned alongside it provided the financial stability that allowed him to commit to painting full time without commercial gallery success. The decision to head west in the early 1950s was, by his own account, almost arbitrary; the hitchhiking trip from Connecticut toward San Francisco was interrupted in Santa Fe, and he stayed.
The Santa Fe of the 1950s and 1960s gave him exactly the conditions his practice required. The city was small enough that a working painter could find a steady audience, the climate allowed him to paint outdoors year-round, and the existing art colony, which included his teacher Alfred Morang and a community of working modernists, provided the artistic context for his particular Fauvist-influenced approach. He painted constantly and almost always on the street: in front of churches, in gardens, on Canyon Road, at the Plaza, often accompanied by a small pack of stray dogs that became as much a part of his public identity as the easel.
His mature style was unmistakable. Heavy impasto applied with both brush and palette knife, saturated colour combinations drawn from Vlaminck and the broader Fauvist tradition, and a near-frantic energy of mark-making produced canvases that captured the New Mexican landscape and Santa Fe city scenes with an intensity that few of his peers approached. The subjects were ordinary, flowers, gardens, mountain views, adobe walls, but the handling was anything but.
His public persona extended his reputation beyond the painting itself. He ran for president, governor, and mayor as a perennial candidate, traded paintings for veterinary services for his dogs, and lived a deliberately bohemian life that became part of the city's mid-century folklore. The "El Diferente" name, Spanish for "the different one", was earned. The bronze statue installed in a Santa Fe park after his death registers the unusual affection in which the city held him, and his paintings have continued to circulate steadily through New Mexican galleries and private collections in the decades since.