Ricky Aiello Jr. is an artist and writer from New York, currently living and working in Southern California. His work moves between painting, drawing, poetry, and fiction, often without much concern for where one ends and another begins.

Raised in New York, Aiello began painting and drawing at an early age. His work entered the New York art scene in his early twenties, including a 2014 exhibition at Gallery 151 in Chelsea alongside artists Fab 5 Freddy and Bradley Theodore.

His paintings are unruly, sometimes humorous, occasionally confrontational. They combine abstraction, figures, handwritten language, and strange, half-remembered imagery. There is an affection for things left unfinished, for mistakes that become permanent, and for the peculiar beauty of objects and people that have seen better days. His drawings follow a similar instinct, balancing crude gestures with moments of unexpected tenderness.

His writing inhabits much the same world. Moving between fiction and poetry, Aiello writes about working people, loneliness, love, memory, bad luck, and the absurdity of being. His poems resist tidy conclusions, wandering between observations, broken conversations, humor, and images that arrive without explanation.

He is the author of The Sound of Pennies Falling and the Places They Go, a novel written over six years, and Nowaday Later and Other Poems, a collection of poetry.

Before returning to his creative work full-time, Aiello spent years in management and working with horses, experiences that continue to find their way into his writing and paintings.

His work, whether on a canvas or a page, is less concerned with making sense of the world than with documenting its peculiarities.

Aiello lives with his wife and their animals in Ventura County, California..