Santoré attended Parson’s School of Design in New York City and went on to study at the The Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where he honed his skills as a painter.

He began exhibiting his work in the 1980s and quickly gained recognition for his unique style and bold use of color.

Throughout his career, Santoré’s work evolved and changed, reflecting his ongoing exploration of new techniques and styles. He experimented with different mediums, including oil paint, encaustic, acrylics, and watercolors, and his subjects ranged from the human figure to urban landscapes and still life.

He frequently employed a technique called “alla prima,” which involves applying wet paint to wet paint in order to create a sense of immediacy and energy in the final work.

Despite his success as an artist, Santoré is known for his humility and dedication to his craft. He once said, “I want my paintings to stand alone, to speak for themselves. I am only the conduit.” He believed that art was a universal language that could communicate across cultures and languages.

In addition to painting, Santoré was also a prolific printmaker, creating etchings, lithographs, and other prints continuing to today. His work has been exhibited in numerous galleries and museums across the United States and around the world, and is held in many private and public collections.

Santoré primarily works in his Soho studio focusing on his vibrant and expressive art. His work continues to inspire and captivate viewers as a talented and innovative artist who pushes the boundaries of contemporary painting. His works continue to inspire and move viewers with their raw emotional power and dynamic visual language. His contributions to the art world will be remembered for years to come, and he remains a beloved figure among artists and art enthusiasts alike.

Santoré is best known for his series of large format, word paintings, abstract figures, heavily influence as a boomer generation painter, the colors, music, fashion and advertising of the 1960s & 70s he was exposed to as a child. His “neo-postwar abstract expressionist paintings”, a practice he began in 1986. He started introducing Words and numbers into his early and notable abstract paintings, such as “Famous” (1986), “Baby Linen” (1987) “Bull Market” (1988) and “JunkBond” (1989) thus reinstating content. His use of defined or extant symbols differentiated his paintings from the gestural abstraction of the Abstract Expressionists, (however he including this method of painting) whose paintings were often understood as expressive of the individual personality or psychology of the artist. Because Santoré imported well-known motifs into the fine arts, his paintings can be read as both representational (a factories, figures, aircraft) and as abstract patterns. Curators and collector’s characterize his choice of subjects as freeing him from decisions about composition. Santoré has remarked: “What’s interesting to me is developing an interconnected visual language and exploring common element across various narratives and composition . It’s not all mine,” or, that the visual language I repete are “s the mind already knows and challenges the viewer to relearn what they recognize.”

He also often used painted reliefs in his paintings which challenge typical conceptions of paintings as two-dimensional. Santoré often used oil, oil stick, encaustic and military and industrial enamel’s as a painting method to create bumpy, textured surfaces unusual in painting.

Santoré also produces intaglio & giclée prints, sculptures and lithographs. Since 1984 Santoré has worked in a variety of printmaking techniques to investigate and develop existing compositions. Initially, lithography suited Santoré and enabled him to create print versions of the visual language that filled his paintings.