Scottie Bellissemo

Artist and professional wood worker, Scott (“Scottie”) Bellissemo sat down with this writer at Wave Pool in Camp Washington, where he built and maintains the Wood Shop to share some of the challenges and high points of his creative journey as a Maker in Cincinnati. 

Diagnosed with ADHD as a boy, he struggled in Catholic school until he found an outlet for his active creativity through public school art programs. Bellissemo explains that his parents always said he was “easy to deal with,” because he could be occupied by art supplies all day long. “I just had that imaginary world thing going on in my head as a kid,” he says.  

And that strong foundation in imagination is probably one of the key factors in his creative success.

These days, Bellissemo runs the Wood Shop while simultaneously holding time for an active fine arts practice, and he has been relying solely on making a living from his artistic labor for the past three years. Several years prior to then, the artist had been supplementing his income with nights tending bars and days working in installation at local arts institutions. 

“I just feel really happy to be at a time in my life where I can devote all of my energy to making and teaching,” he says quite genuinely. And it seems clear that his vision for the future of his creative process is being realized.

As early as Second grade, people around him started taking note of his work, Bellissemo attests, and perhaps the crucial element was that he was “hungry to learn it all”. And he has done just that ever since. 

Several crucial moments throughout the next several decades seem to have made a lasting impression on the sculptural artist’s practice. 

In 1996 he met Thom Shaw, one of Cincinnati’s best known and most admired contemporary artists, for an Artists Reaching Classrooms experience during his senior year at Oak Hills High School. His art teacher Jan Thomas, who was like a second mom to him at the time, knew he was struggling and asked Shaw to stay after class to talk to the young artist. 

Bellissemmo recalls of the meeting, “I’ll never forget the time where he said, ‘life is like a bar of gold in a toilet with shit on top of it. To get to that gold, you need to reach through that shit and pull it out.’” And his recounting of the metaphor rings both humorous and true, as Scottie likewise attests that, though it hasn’t been an easy road to trod as a maker, it has been “great.”

During college at the Art Academy of Cincinnati Bellissemo switched from two-dimensional fine art to more sculptural work, focusing on woodworking and glassblowing. But he was adamantly interdisciplinary in his approach—despite the school not having a Mixed Media concentration at the time. He created an artist performance group with AAC professor Gary Gaffney, and team-taught a class on furniture design with Adjunct Faculty member Jack True—all while he was still a student.

After graduation, Bellissemo ran the woodshop at the Art Academy for seven years, where he co-taught classes with other faculty. During his tenure there he helped them moved from the College’s previous home in Mt. Adams to their current Over-the-Rhine location, so he also had the opportunity to build it out from scratch. 

But art jobs aren’t always stable and he admits there were financial struggles and a lack of full time benefits which led him to eventually leave the Art Academy after so many years as both a student and a staff member.  

Bellissemo moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with a friend during the recession but struggled to find work for several months, until taking a trip to the experimental community of Arcosanti in Arizona designed by architect Paolo Soleri. 

Arcosanti, to the uninitiated, is an intentional community focused on minimizing the human footprint. There, Scottie volunteered and worked in the foundry as well as gave tours for about a year and a half, learning various skills and contributing to the community, but eventually returned to Cincinnati.

Always working with his hands, upon his return home Scottie worked preparing trilobites for a local business. He describes the meticulous process of removing the matrix, and preserving the rock they were found on with the same care and consideration as he does in describing his woodworking process—a true sign of a maker: no matter the task, their goal is 

This is clearly a person who enjoys crafting beautiful objects that live in the world, but ultimately have their place of origin in the mind. 

Today, Scottie works independently on various commissioned functional and aesthetically-driven projects—many that come to him via word of mouth—in addition to his own personal art practice. He is driven by materials and processes that allow him to work intuitively, and Bellissemo is a wealth of knowledge and resource for Wave Pool’s community of makers. To date, he has taught over 200 students in small classes of 4-5 people since 2018. 

We can only imagine what the future holds in store for Scottie’s next adventures in making!

To find out more about Scottie's adventures, follow @scottiebellissemo on social media or https://www.facebook.com/scottie.bellissemo/