Trumbull Art Gallery
The Trumbull Art Gallery is a non-profit corporation created in 1957 by a group of dedicated art patrons and practitioners interested in the promotion of the visual arts and artists in our community.
Education Program
Anthony Angelilli:
Bone, Meat, and Spirit at Trumbull Art Gallery
Artist Biography
American born artist Anthony Angelilli, currently works, and resides in Youngstown, Ohio. He is a native of blue-collar working-class people and was exposed to different work strategies to install tile floors, and brick patios. Processes such as mixing “mud” or grout, substances used to set tile influenced his approach to making. For painting, he experiments with raw materials, and paint to acquire specific textures, colors, and lines. In addition, Anthony is fascinated by the way information is retrieved, and how visual, and verbal language constantly changes. Having grown up next to the forest, he reminisces on family activities such as camping, sifting for arrow heads, precious stones, and horseback riding without the advancement of digital communication.
After obtaining a Bachelor of Fine Art Degree from Youngstown State University, Anthony delved even more into his painting, and drawing practice, which has involved the way we interpret loss and collect memory. The materials he uses are viewed as remnants of physical information, and tries to connect these things as a way of sharing an intimate interaction and slowing down. Anthony has received numerous awards for
painting and drawing, and is included in the permanent collection of printmaking at the Glasgow Print Studio in Glasgow, Scotland. Today, he continues to work, and live in the United States.
Artist Statement
I attempt to construct materials into a painting while the physicality of its surface becomes a kind of indexical mark. The items I use are either bought or collected from hardware stores, flea markets, and the curbside of interstate routes. During the work process things are usually deconstructed and reconstructed onto the surface of the canvas in correlation to blobs of paint, grids, and forms of lines that are pieced together in layers. This sort of decision making tends to become a laborious ritual until exhaustion. Eventually all the materials obtain and celebrate the vulnerability of paint, fabric, and string that mask the canvas and droop away from it.
Meanwhile, there is interest in a variety of subjects such as alchemy, architecture, anthropology, history, and construction, but it feels impossible to ignore the fact that I am merely intrigued by the act of making. I often wonder how a painting or drawing can sort of become a carbon hand-print. Is it able to provoke certain memories of geological landscapes, people I love, or a magnitude of information that presents itself in the form of numeric and alphabetic languages through the surface of digital devices? Regarding all of this, perhaps I am surrendering to this duality between material and non-material, reaction and non-reaction, intimate, but distant experience in a digitally enmeshed era.
