A second chance for art student Ed Graziano, 50

Ed Graziano, like any astute art-school student, knows where to find the free food. "There's three stations," he said to a classmate over the whir of an exhibit opening last week at the University of the Arts.

The man who once wore custom suits and $500 shoes untucked a white dress shirt from his baggy jeans. He clutched a water with lemon, grabbed from the open bar. A red ribbon attached to his name tag identified him: ARTIST.

Graziano, a third-year fine arts major with a focus in sculpture, turns 51 in May. He is a graying undergraduate, a man of paradoxes.

Students thought he was a professor. Professors thought he was a professor. Admissions officials thought he was a parent.

"At first, it was definitely a little confusing," said Allyson Gallagher, a 21-year-old classmate. "But now I don't even notice."

Which is what Graziano wants.

"I'd love to just live here and not leave," Graziano said from his studio in the back of Hamilton Hall. "I finally know this is what I was meant to do all along. But it is those things in my past that brought me to this point. I'm not regretting it."

Graziano, a bulky man with cropped gray hair and a soul patch, built a lucrative career, first at his father's landscaping business in North Wales. Then he helped start a company that removed snow in seven states. Next, he went to work in business development for Guidemark, a contractor in Souderton that painted lines on roads.

Life was good. Graziano said he pulled in as much as $300,000 a year.

"Spending a couple hundred dollars on a bottle of wine," Graziano said. "That was nothing."

One day, four years ago, his boss at Guidemark called a meeting. The economy had tanked. The company had to eliminate overhead.

"I was large overhead," Graziano said. He laughed.

This was a sign, his wife said. Gina Graziano found a job as a recording secretary at the co-op housing community in the Northeast's Pennypack Woods, where the couple live. They erased $28,000 in debt through a church-run program and downsized.

Long before, in 1982, Graziano spent a month at UArts - then called Philadelphia College of Art. His parents begged him to do something else.

"The only way you're going to make a living as a fine artist," his father told him, "is when you're dead."

The second time around, Gina Graziano urged her husband to follow his dream. They would manage on her $25,000 salary, and it would test everything they knew.

"It has not been easy," she said. "But you learn to work with what you have. You really realize you don't need most of what you have."

Start with the second car. The dinners at Buddakan and Pod. The custom shirts and suits. Twice-a-year trips to Maui. The material things that led Gina to conclude Ed was out of her league when she met him in 1992 at a friend's pool party.

"He had it all," she recalled. "He lived in the suburbs. He drove a nice car. He had a great job. He was handsome. The whole thing."

They didn't start dating until several years later, after another chance encounter at a wedding. They were married in 1999. They lost Grace on May 22, 2001. She was born at 231/2 weeks.

"We got to hold her for 45 minutes," Graziano said.

The two needed counseling. They turned to church for guidance. Challenges have persisted.

After Ed Graziano's mother died in 2011, he found a book in her closet. It was a journal she kept during an agonizing monthlong hospital stay.

"I just sat there and read the whole thing," Graziano said. "Sobbing, sobbing, sobbing."

He took it with him - a source of inspiration - to art school. For a month he transformed the journal into a piece called Revelations that hung at the UArts Art Unleashed exhibit, a weeklong event that raised more than $265,000 for scholarships.

Graziano had selected three diary entries, written in his mother's impeccable penmanship, to be displayed on acrylic boxes. He layered them with epoxy and pigment to capture the emotions of her words. He asked $1,450 for the piece.

His professors and classmates describe Graziano as a man who enlivens their studies. He carries a 3.8 grade-point average, he said. Most of his tuition is covered by scholarships and grants.

"I liked his enthusiasm," said Jeanne Jaffe, a UArts professor. "I just wasn't sure where that was going. But he has the depth to meet the enthusiasm."

At last week's opening, Graziano hugged Gallagher, his young classmate. He shares studio space with the junior from Mount Laurel. She had news: Her piece sold.

"Oh, congratulations!" he said. "If it wasn't sold by the end of the night, I would have bought it."

Graziano sometimes thinks like the man from his previous life. He insists that he and his wife live off her paycheck. There are some savings, but Graziano pretends they do not exist.

The plan is to return to Maui for good and open a gallery there. He has an idea of a nonprofit space that would promote less fortunate artists. That, of course, will require money.

Gallagher's dad tapped Graziano on the shoulder. They basked in the young woman's success. They stared at Revelations.

"Did it sell yet?" he asked Graziano.

"No, it didn't sell," the 50-year-old art student said. He grinned. "I priced it high so it wouldn't sell."