He made his name as an actor in Los Angeles, but Burt Young, best known for playing Paulie Pennino in Sylvester Stallone’s “Rocky” series, came to Port Washington to practice his second craft as an artist.
“I’m pretty much a recluse, which is why I’m coming to Port Washington,” he told Newsday in a 2010 interview. “I used to live on a boat in the harbor here. I’m not much of a networker. I’m more comfortable with my old pals.”
Young, who died Oct. 8, was for years a part-time resident of Port Washington with an apartment on Main Street. He moved there in the mid-2000s, according to an interview he gave to TheRumpus.net, and used the space as an art studio. While in town, he was known to visit Louie’s, the town’s well-known steakhouse, where he might order fish and chips and an iced tea.
In 2010, Young exhibited nine paintings at the Nassau County Museum of Art’s Library Gallery. (Some of the actor’s canvases can be glimpsed in 2006’s “Rocky Balboa,” the sixth film in the series.) “Color really gets me,” Young said about his paintings. “It’s all built on emotion, what I’m saying to myself, by myself, and about others.”
Young’s paintings — he often worked in acrylic — had a modern, Impressionist style: something of Picasso, maybe a little something of Alice Neel. But Young never claimed to come from any school of art. Though he learned to act from the legendary Lee Strasberg, he said art came naturally to him as a child and he never took a class.
“I won a New York City school art contest when I was 12,” he told Newsday. “A kid on a bike … something about ‘Don’t ride a bike in the park.'” He added: “I’ve always painted. At my ex-girl’s house, I did a mural at 4 in the morning on the wall. She had it painted over when I left.”
Young also claimed to have lent his art skills to the original “Rocky,” at least behind the scenes. “I taught Stallone how to storyboard,” he told TheRumpus. “I just showed him.”
