"The Creative Process: An Emotional Adventure", Mozaic Magazine, November/December, 2006
by Ruth Mittelholtz,
An interview with artist Tony Luciani
Spiritual, mysterious, psychological, moral, and other earthly: these are some of the terms used by reviewers to describe the work of Durham artist, Tony Luciani. As I look at the images in his studio and on his website www.starvingartist.ca, I see all of this, as well as sensitivity, drama, mood, and humour. In style his work is representational, and in some senses traditional. It is apparent at once that he has great technical gifts. He works in a broad range of media including charcoal, oil, egg tempera, watercolour and pastel and explores an equally broad range of subject material from portraits and figure studies to interiors, landscapes and village streetscapes.
What Tony himself says about his work is that he is trying to portray from within himself the mood and feeling that he gets from the subject material. He describes his work as "interpretive realism, traditionally inspired."
Tony honed his gifts through formal studies during most of the 1970’s, first at Toronto’s Central Technical School, and then at Sheridan Community College, the Ontario College of Art, and, at the postgraduate level, in OCA’s Off-Campus Program in Florence, Italy. He has been a full-time practicing artist for 30 years, with work in private and public collections in Canada, the USA, and Europe, including Guelph’s Macdonald Stewart Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and Canada House, London, England. He is represented commercially by the Loch Gallery in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary.
As a reflection of his belief that local arts are important to a community, Tony is the founder of the Minto Arts Council and the Harriston-Minto Heritage Gallery, a non-profit volunteer-run gallery. Until moving to Durham, he was on the gallery’s board of directors, curating many of the exhibitions. He says he is amazed with a lot of the work of local artists he meets. “They just need the space to publicly show their talents, and the encouragement to continue.” Tony also offers private art classes to groups and individuals of all ages and at all levels from beginner to advanced.
At his studio in a former church, I ask Tony first about the obvious, his great skill in drawing. He says with both modesty and confidence that all his instructors drew – it was a time when drawing was an important part of art school curricula, and cites one of them, Eric Freifeld, as an artist whose work he especially admires. (Eric Freifeld, 1919–1984, Canadian Drawing Master.) Although he has worked in many media, drawing is his passion, and will always be number one.
How does he manage to express so much feeling while working within what might seem to be the tight boundaries of representation?
“The most important thing is the feeling behind the painting”, he says, but he does want to know that an artist has an understanding of the technical background. He compares painting to writing: “Before you can write a book, you must first learn the alphabet, then words, sentences and eventually create a story.” Similarly, every artist must start at the beginning, with the basics, the bones, in order to get to the point of relaying a message, a thought or a feeling. An artist may work in various media, but the artist is still the same person inside.
He gives as an example the Spanish realist painter, Antonio López García, whose paintings of mundane objects such as kitchen sinks are deeply imbued with emotion. It is the atmosphere in the work that is important. Picasso was a technically gifted artist who used his abilities for expressive purposes. If an artist isn’t in touch with his feelings “it’s as if he just throws the paint on the canvas and says ‘there.’” Tony’s response to this is, “OK, what is it?” At Canada House in London he’s happy to have his work hanging next to a painting by Canadian abstract expressionist Jean Paul Riopelle. “He got it. He was true to himself”.
When Tony views work by others he’s looking to see if there’s a “hum.” It’s hard to explain what this is, he says. Only a few pieces in the world have given him that “hum.” “You look a piece and feel it in your gut. It’s not completely about subject or colour or anything visual. You get an electricity inside of yourself that encompasses your whole body. It’s very personal for sure. What I get from a work of art, or listening to certain music, and what you’d get, will be completely different sensations”.
But how does one translate feelings into art? As an illustration, Tony describes how his most recent series of drawings and oil paintings, titled ‘Lost in Transition’, came about. He doesn’t analyze intellectually: images “just come” to him, and this series started with a vision of himself in a high cornfield, lost. “The tall stocks were symbolic of everything that looks and feels the same. Direction was confusing”. As a metaphor, he used a store-front mannequin torso that was gathering dust in his studio as the model representing himself and ultimately anyone else who feels misplaced or in limbo. Without a head, arms or legs, the torso awkwardly appears in a pasture surrounded by cattle and a gossiping crow, in a horse stall mimicking a neighboring Clydesdale, in a hayfield bound by twine, and in an antique storefront window mingling with other castaways, but in all the paintings the theme is similar, wanting to fit in. With the series ended, he can see that the significance of the mannequin is that it doesn’t belong in the settings in which it is painted, and that he was working through feelings of being “hopelessly lost, not knowing where you are emotionally or physically.” Now that he’s ‘found Durham’ - the town itself and a suitable studio and home - he finds that the series has simply stopped.
Tony shares another example of how feelings – feelings not necessarily consciously recognized – direct his art making. Ten years ago he was working on a series of paintings that began with family images of his wife and children, progressed to images of himself and his children with faces hidden and then to “unclothed body parts with no faces” (drawings and paintings of figures cropped by the edge of the paper or canvas to leave only the torso, or the back, or the legs), and then to interiors looking out of closed windows. Finally, paintings of skies began to appear. A friend of his pointed out to him that the series reflects his re-emerging from a dark period (the breakup of his marriage, and death of his father) into the sky, as if he were free again. The point is, the series was not planned; it just happened, and in retrospect, he was able to see where he was going.
Tony sums up his creative process by saying that making art for him is “an emotional adventure”.
What does the future hold? In view of his recognized mastery of technique, I am surprised when he says he finds painting “very difficult.” He “draws in his painting” but is intrigued by paintings that have “no trace of drawing.” He offers as examples the paintings of Lucien Freud (British painter and printmaker who during the course of his career moved from a meticulously detailed style to a broader handling of paint) and Francis Bacon (Anglo-Irish figurative painter who employs thick layers of paint). Tony is moving towards this painterly approach, but the evolution is not something that can be forced. Like thematic subject material, style must come from within. One must be one with one’s work.
It’s all part of the adventure.
An interview with artist Tony Luciani
Spiritual, mysterious, psychological, moral, and other earthly: these are some of the terms used by reviewers to describe the work of Durham artist, Tony Luciani. As I look at the images in his studio and on his website www.starvingartist.ca, I see all of this, as well as sensitivity, drama, mood, and humour. In style his work is representational, and in some senses traditional. It is apparent at once that he has great technical gifts. He works in a broad range of media including charcoal, oil, egg tempera, watercolour and pastel and explores an equally broad range of subject material from portraits and figure studies to interiors, landscapes and village streetscapes.
What Tony himself says about his work is that he is trying to portray from within himself the mood and feeling that he gets from the subject material. He describes his work as "interpretive realism, traditionally inspired."
Tony honed his gifts through formal studies during most of the 1970’s, first at Toronto’s Central Technical School, and then at Sheridan Community College, the Ontario College of Art, and, at the postgraduate level, in OCA’s Off-Campus Program in Florence, Italy. He has been a full-time practicing artist for 30 years, with work in private and public collections in Canada, the USA, and Europe, including Guelph’s Macdonald Stewart Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Mississauga, and Canada House, London, England. He is represented commercially by the Loch Gallery in Toronto, Winnipeg and Calgary.
As a reflection of his belief that local arts are important to a community, Tony is the founder of the Minto Arts Council and the Harriston-Minto Heritage Gallery, a non-profit volunteer-run gallery. Until moving to Durham, he was on the gallery’s board of directors, curating many of the exhibitions. He says he is amazed with a lot of the work of local artists he meets. “They just need the space to publicly show their talents, and the encouragement to continue.” Tony also offers private art classes to groups and individuals of all ages and at all levels from beginner to advanced.
At his studio in a former church, I ask Tony first about the obvious, his great skill in drawing. He says with both modesty and confidence that all his instructors drew – it was a time when drawing was an important part of art school curricula, and cites one of them, Eric Freifeld, as an artist whose work he especially admires. (Eric Freifeld, 1919–1984, Canadian Drawing Master.) Although he has worked in many media, drawing is his passion, and will always be number one.
How does he manage to express so much feeling while working within what might seem to be the tight boundaries of representation?
“The most important thing is the feeling behind the painting”, he says, but he does want to know that an artist has an understanding of the technical background. He compares painting to writing: “Before you can write a book, you must first learn the alphabet, then words, sentences and eventually create a story.” Similarly, every artist must start at the beginning, with the basics, the bones, in order to get to the point of relaying a message, a thought or a feeling. An artist may work in various media, but the artist is still the same person inside.
He gives as an example the Spanish realist painter, Antonio López García, whose paintings of mundane objects such as kitchen sinks are deeply imbued with emotion. It is the atmosphere in the work that is important. Picasso was a technically gifted artist who used his abilities for expressive purposes. If an artist isn’t in touch with his feelings “it’s as if he just throws the paint on the canvas and says ‘there.’” Tony’s response to this is, “OK, what is it?” At Canada House in London he’s happy to have his work hanging next to a painting by Canadian abstract expressionist Jean Paul Riopelle. “He got it. He was true to himself”.
When Tony views work by others he’s looking to see if there’s a “hum.” It’s hard to explain what this is, he says. Only a few pieces in the world have given him that “hum.” “You look a piece and feel it in your gut. It’s not completely about subject or colour or anything visual. You get an electricity inside of yourself that encompasses your whole body. It’s very personal for sure. What I get from a work of art, or listening to certain music, and what you’d get, will be completely different sensations”.
But how does one translate feelings into art? As an illustration, Tony describes how his most recent series of drawings and oil paintings, titled ‘Lost in Transition’, came about. He doesn’t analyze intellectually: images “just come” to him, and this series started with a vision of himself in a high cornfield, lost. “The tall stocks were symbolic of everything that looks and feels the same. Direction was confusing”. As a metaphor, he used a store-front mannequin torso that was gathering dust in his studio as the model representing himself and ultimately anyone else who feels misplaced or in limbo. Without a head, arms or legs, the torso awkwardly appears in a pasture surrounded by cattle and a gossiping crow, in a horse stall mimicking a neighboring Clydesdale, in a hayfield bound by twine, and in an antique storefront window mingling with other castaways, but in all the paintings the theme is similar, wanting to fit in. With the series ended, he can see that the significance of the mannequin is that it doesn’t belong in the settings in which it is painted, and that he was working through feelings of being “hopelessly lost, not knowing where you are emotionally or physically.” Now that he’s ‘found Durham’ - the town itself and a suitable studio and home - he finds that the series has simply stopped.
Tony shares another example of how feelings – feelings not necessarily consciously recognized – direct his art making. Ten years ago he was working on a series of paintings that began with family images of his wife and children, progressed to images of himself and his children with faces hidden and then to “unclothed body parts with no faces” (drawings and paintings of figures cropped by the edge of the paper or canvas to leave only the torso, or the back, or the legs), and then to interiors looking out of closed windows. Finally, paintings of skies began to appear. A friend of his pointed out to him that the series reflects his re-emerging from a dark period (the breakup of his marriage, and death of his father) into the sky, as if he were free again. The point is, the series was not planned; it just happened, and in retrospect, he was able to see where he was going.
Tony sums up his creative process by saying that making art for him is “an emotional adventure”.
What does the future hold? In view of his recognized mastery of technique, I am surprised when he says he finds painting “very difficult.” He “draws in his painting” but is intrigued by paintings that have “no trace of drawing.” He offers as examples the paintings of Lucien Freud (British painter and printmaker who during the course of his career moved from a meticulously detailed style to a broader handling of paint) and Francis Bacon (Anglo-Irish figurative painter who employs thick layers of paint). Tony is moving towards this painterly approach, but the evolution is not something that can be forced. Like thematic subject material, style must come from within. One must be one with one’s work.
It’s all part of the adventure.
script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-42318387-1', 'tonyluciani.ca');
ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>
(function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){
(i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),
m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)
})(window,document,'script','//www.google-analytics.com/analytics.js','ga');
ga('create', 'UA-42318387-1', 'tonyluciani.ca');
ga('send', 'pageview');
</script>
