Amped-Up Art

Plenty of artists use rock 'n' roll for inspiration, but only Todd DiCiurcio gets onstage and gives bands the bowl-of-fruit treatment while they perform. "I start when they start playing, and I end when they end," says the 35-year-old artist and surfer. "It's a piece of charcoal and me. That's it." After the amps have been unplugged and the fans have gone home, DiCiurcio will take the finished drawing to his Brooklyn studio, photograph it, project the image onto a six-by-eight-foot canvas, and painstakingly trace every squiggle and line with black paint. The resulting works capture the brash, chaotic beauty of live music as performed by groups such as the Killers, Guster, Dinosaur Jr., and DiCiurcio's all-time favorite. Guided by Voices, whose lead singer. Robert Pollard, calls the paintings "staticelectric reflections" of what happens onstage.

DiCiurcio's work, thus far, has mainly been known to a cozy group of friends and admirers, including auction-house magnate Simon de Pury,Sopranos star Michael Imperioli, and supermodel Petra Nemcova. This winter, Yvonne Force Villareal and Doreen Remen, of the Art Production Fund, will host the opening of DiCiurcio's first New York solo show, in a new nightclub at 100 Lafayette Street. That crowd won't necessarily know DiCiurcio or the music he celebrates, but he isn't worried. "I'm just making the marks and seeing what happens," he says. "You really have to believe in magic to do what 1 do."

MICHAEL HOGAN