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Anthony Falcetta ’92
Artist • Greater Boston Recent favorite color: Cobalt turquoise
Anthony Falcetta’s lush, gestural work springs from a dialogue between the observable, external world and the fragments he carries from his own internal landscape: memory, emotion, curiosity and a willingness to get lost from time to time. For a long time,” he says, “I’ve had this idea of a painting as its own landscape, with a geography, a logic and a history of its own. My project as a painter is to simultaneously build the piece and help it find its balance. Sometimes I think about what I do as ‘terraforming’—very literally creating a topography or territory inside the bounds of the painting.” Tidal marshes and coastlines, the structures and textures of New England’s faded industrial towns—they all provide inspiration. Just as important is his evident passion for the process itself— paint and pigment, exploring and improvising, the push/pull between painterly image and physical object. It produces work that one viewer described as “mature and solid. No gimmicks, no bells and whistles, no trendy hype affiliation, no shock or ‘transgressive’ value, no political grandstanding.” Anthony arrived at Gordon in 1988 as an English major. He traces his “conversion” to a survey course, Arts in Concert. Bruce Herman brought in several large canvases. It was Anthony’s first
30 STILLPOINT | SPRING 2014
time seeing serious art outside a museum; to him they seemed to “breathe and move and throw off sparks.” Gordon did not offer an art major at the time, but Anthony minored in it. After college he spent five years trying various creative pursuits, married the love of his life (Jennie-Rebecca Stine ’92), and then studied painting at Massachusetts College of Art. In 2001 he began “painting with intent,” and since then has only paused long enough to be an at-home parent to Nico, now five-and-a-half. He paints at a studio in Beverly, Massachusetts, and had a solo show last summer at a gallery there. His paintings were recently included in a Barrington Gallery exhibition of art by Gordon faculty and alumni, and his work has been exhibited in gallery shows in Boston and beyond. Art is “kind of a choose-your-own-adventure story,” he says, “and the everyday world doesn’t actually care much whether an individual artist keeps at it or not—but I can’t imagine not making these strange things which get at the stuff of existence and the richness of my surroundings. It has to be (and so often has been) its own reward; anything more is gravy, or grace.” www.anthonyfalcetta.com www.facebook.com/PainterlyAbstraction