"Color and Light"

by Kate Carter

Provincetown Magazine

July 23, 1998

He is a graduate of the Art Institute of Boston. He always painted, but was also "a realist" and knew that he wouldn't be able to make a living solely by painting. He decided to go into graphic design, which was an option many art school graduates took in the era prior to computer graphics. When Anzalone made his career choice "you still were using your hands to draw. Now "graphic designers" spend the whole day at a keyboard."

Anzalone decided to transition out of graphic design and back into art. He left his job in Boston and, with his partner Peter Bez, bought a guest house, Admiral's Landing at 158 Bradford Street. His idea was that the income from the guest house would allow him to scale down his graphic design business and allow him more time to paint.

Throughout the 70's and 80's Anzalone experimented with different styles of painting from abstract to realism. He'd always loved impressionism but didn't quite know how to approach it. This changed in 1994 when he "discovered" the Cape Cod School of Art. Lois Griffel's teaching motivated Anzalone to find a way to focus more on painting. Griffel, he said, "has a way of getting you really excited about color." He went on to explain that when one "sees" something, that they don't usually spend much time "looking" at that thing. He points to a leaf on a nearby shrub. "If you look at that leaf, really look at it for some time, you'll notice that it's not uniformly green. It's many colors."

 For Anzalone, capturing those many colors is only one aspect of what makes up the impressionist style. "The painting, if it's done well, will tell you the time of day, the season and the lighting conditions." Anzalone, like many impressionist painters, will only work on a painting when the conditions are very similar to those in which the painting was begun. This can make for a difficult time when the weather doesn't cooperate.

Anzalone's paintings also capture a feeling. For the impressionist, the feeling does not so much proceed from the subject but from the choice of color and light.

The technique of impressionism is extraordinarily difficult to master. Even for the neophyte, it's easy to distinguish someone who does it well from someone who is still learning to faithfully represent what they "see". Light is fluid until it hits a surface. Then it's exact. Incongruities in the surface produce variations of color. What a quick "look" catches is a recognition. What the impressionist sees is the layer beneath the quick look, "the color within the color".

Anzalone finds his subjects in the natural surroundings of Provincetown and the Lower Cape. The new work he has done concentrates on a more fluid looseness. The paintings from May are sunny and colorful. Since the month of June had very little sun, there is a definite feeling of fog and overcast skys in many of the works.

Chuck Anzalone's painting are clearly those of a man who is working toward mastery; someone who is always trying to see more and transforming that sight into a vision.

Please visit the Lyman-Eyer Gallery or email: lymaneyer@aol.com for more information.