Tommy Macaione — known across Santa Fe as "El Diferente" — was an Italian-American street painter whose Fauvist-coloured, heavy-impasto landscapes, gardens, and city scenes captured Santa Fe across forty years of plein-air painting on the streets and Canyon Road of his adopted city.
Thomas Silvestri "Tommy" Macaione (November 13, 1907 – 1992) was an American post-Impressionist painter, born in New London, Connecticut, to an Italian mother and a Greek father. After his parents separated, he moved with his mother to Sicily as a child, and the extended family stay in Italy through and beyond the First World War — when the family was stranded by the conflict — was where his interest in art first developed. He returned to New London in 1921 or 1922 at fourteen or fifteen.
His formal art training began with a Yale graduate student in Connecticut and continued at the Art Students League in New York and the Rhode Island School of Design. He served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during the Second World War, learning barbering as a sideline that would support him for more than twenty-five years afterward. A hitchhiking trip toward San Francisco in the early 1950s brought him to Santa Fe; he abandoned the rest of the journey and settled there for the rest of his life. He studied locally with the painter Alfred Morang and worked in a vocabulary that drew on Maurice de Vlaminck, Nicolai Fechin, and the Ashcan School — bold Fauvist colour, copious paint, palette-knife handling — applied to the landscapes, gardens, and street scenes around him. He is the subject of a bronze statue in a Santa Fe city park, and his paintings hang in Santa Fe institutions including City Hall, The Shed Restaurant, and the offices of The Santa Fe New Mexican.