“I like painting outside — it keeps my overhead low,” Manhole impressionist

Those heavy iron discs, so ubiquitous and familiar, often they go hidden in plain sight from pedestrians who constantly walk over them.

But not to Carluccio, who began working on sewer covers 18 years ago, after painting scenes of the city and noticing a fascinating array of designs on them.

Since then, he has been laying canvases on them and creating paintings that are something like colorful rubbings — a style that gives a new twist to the term impressionist painting.

On a recent weekday, Carluccio walked into the Native Leather shop on Carmine Street. The store’s owner, Carol Walsh, lets him store his painting materials there.

He mounted a wooden cabinet on a hand-truck, filled it with his materials and wheeled it down Carmine Street to a small, triangular park known as Father Demo Square.

Carluccio, who is tall with long limbs and large hands, wore a paint-smeared T-shirt, shorts and sneakers. He stopped at a large Con Edison manhole cover and tossed a folded white canvas down next to it.

“I like this cover because I can break it into sections,” Carluccio said of the design, which resembled a sliced pizza, with ridges radiating from the center.

He spread the canvas over the cover and duct-taped it to the sidewalk and pulled out three tubes of acrylic paint: red, yellow and blue.

Carluccio held court with passers-by, as he squirted the paint onto the bumpy canvas, and then used a coarse wire brush to work it into the rough contours of the cover’s crevices and ridges.

With a squeegee, he skimmed off the excess paint, leaving a colorful imprint of the cover on the canvas.

Carluccio is married with three children and lives in Harlem. He grew up in Teaneck, New Jersey, the youngest of five children, studied film at New York University and worked for several years at Madison Square Garden as a director of promotional videos, where he operated the fan-cam at New York Knicks and New York Rangers games.

Now he makes ends meet with the help of a day job delivering groceries on the Upper East Side and by selling his paintings online and at gallery shows he organizes.

On Saturdays, he sets up at a farmers market at Manhattan Avenue and 110th Street in Harlem; he also displays and sells his canvases while painting.

At Father Demo Square, he hung an array of framed canvases on an iron fence. He said he has sold commissioned, customized paintings for up to $3,000, but that his pictures on the street started at $200.

“This one’s from Bed-Stuy,” he said, holding up a painting of a smallish, round “North Brooklyn Iron Foundry” cover.

“In neighborhoods like the West Village and Brooklyn Heights, where you have more historic preservation, the covers are older and there’s more variety,” he said.

He held up a canvas done from a cover in Central Park that bore the name of the city’s Department of Parks and Recreation, but Carluccio amended the painting to leave only part of the last word: Creation.

When adding details and highlights to paintings in his home studio, Carluccio often uses scraping and brush work to customize a sewer cover’s original lettering into his own slogans, or into requested messages for commissioned paintings.

This year he was commissioned by the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team to paint a sewer cap for use in a display of public art in the team’s new arena.

Carluccio chose a cover at Broadway and 108th Street that bore the word “Manhattan,” which became “Milwaukee.”

The Bucks’ president, Peter Feigin, a former Knicks executive, said in an interview that he remembered Carluccio and his work, and felt that it embodied a gritty, urban element common to all cities.

“The coolness of it was beyond belief,” Feigin said.

Carluccio carries a pocket version of the Constitution, so he can cite the First Amendment in invoking his legal right to sell his art in public when he is questioned by the police.

On busy streets, he might dress in a generic uniform and set up traffic cones to deter traffic and challenges from the authorities.

“Usually, if a police officer comes up, I usually ask him what he thinks of my work, and that starts a conversation,” he said.

He is occasionally berated by doormen or business owners for painting in front of their buildings, he said. Then there are the protective homeowners of historic Brooklyn Heights town houses that still have original coal chute covers in the sidewalks.

“I had a building owner come running out, yelling, ‘Are you stealing it?'” he recalled. “I said, ‘No, I’m painting it.'”

Carluccio said he survived brain cancer a decade ago that left his brain “rewired” artistically, and better able to consider the sewer caps as more than mundane objects.

“Art changes the way we look at things,” he said. “So I like it when someone tells me, ‘I never looked at a manhole cover that way.'”

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The Particulars:

Name: Paul Carluccio

Age: 47

Who He Is: A Painter of manhole covers

Where He’s From: Harlem

Telling Detail: Carluccio carries a pocket version of the Constitution, so he can cite the First Amendment in invoking his legal right to sell his art in public when he is questioned by the police.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.