Anthony Bacarella
(b. 1944)
Anthony Bacarella is a self-taught artist whose paintings have defined a new style of abstraction. His compositions are meticulously hand-wrought, worked and re-worked, layered, detailed, and painstakingly fastidious. They are not geometric and yet to some, suggest the undulating waves upon meadows of grass. They are not biomorphic, but have been compared to microscopic views of living cells, or cities of the earth as seen from the sky. His is a body of work with an intuitive logic of its own. Born in Brooklyn in 1944, and with no formal training in art, Bacarella has been compelled to paint since the early 1970’s. But it was always abstraction that fascinated him; he was never interested in still life, portrait, or landscape. His oldest works were created with oil paints and are heavily coated with color upon color, built up so thickly that only traces of the earliest paint peek through. The more recent works tend to be done with acrylics applied more thinly, though his complex interaction of line and color is evident in all. From the book Bacarella by Brian Hannon.
