Anthony Mastromatteo: Fundamental Depth And Unending Process

As an occupation, I describe myself as someone who thinks about and then makes paintings, builds a network of private clients and representative agents potentially interested in buying or selling these paintings, and prays to any and all manifestations of the Almighty that someone actually does purchase something in time to meet the demands of the bill collectors lining up at my door with hands extended. That is painting as an occupation, and I don’t ignore this reality. It is a stupid pursuit as an occupation. But as a vocation…a calling…it is magic. I read and think and look and feel as much as possible to inform myself with material for that next painting. I pour myself into its execution with love and attentiveness until it approximates the perfection of my vision and understanding. Sometimes that pouring is 1 day. Sometimes it is 1- months. Sometimes it is fun. Sometimes it is sheer brutality. As a vocation, there is nothing else I can see myself doing on a daily basis

Very few people pay any attention to me, so the most surprising thing might simply be that I have something to contribute of compelling interest. Beyond that, I think the few who do know me would be surprised to find out that before becoming a painter I wanted (and still, to some extent want) to be a writer before wanting to be a painter. But things just don’t work for me like that. Paintings make sense to me in their construction and execution. I am paralyzed by nearly every attempt to express myself with the written word

At the moment I am on page 94 of Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead. I am six months into it and will probably need another 12 to 18 months to finish it. I am not an achievement reader. I read until the content paralyzes my brain. With some books that never happens. With this one, most mornings I make it through one or two paragraphs. I always read before I run, so the running allows for the act of processing the morning reading. I opened Whitehead based on a reference from The Fold by Giles Deleuze. As a reader, I am a follower of threads. This was a thread from a previous book. When I find the thread I purchase the corresponding book. When I finish the current reading, I assess which thread makes sense given my current interests, state of mind and availability

Without a doubt, my favorite book was Bullfinch’s Mythology by Thomas Bullfinch. When I was six or seven I had the chickenpox. This gave me 1 week off school with nothing to do. I picked this book up and have been immersed in the ramifications of my engagement with it ever since, in one way or another

I had neither affinity for nor interest in art as a child. I grew up in suburban Ohio. I grew up on Gilligan’s Island and soccer. Art played no role whatsoever. It was actually on a spurious trip to the Cleveland Art Museum on a day that was supposed to be spent at a college fair that art became a reality to me. It was whilst standing in front of JMW Turner’s “Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons” that my life changed. At the time I did not understand why, but looking at an impasto passage in the sky I felt the visceral sensation that somehow this thing made sense to me. The rest of my life, beginning with my Art History degree, has been a clumsy dance trying to unwrap just what was contained in that sensation of sense. Art History led me to the art world in the employ of Christie’s Auction House. And that led me to the actual pursuit of making paintings myself. This last step did not happen until I was 27 years old, at the Art Student’s League in NYC

My most recent purchase: The Ritual Process by Victor Turner. It addresses a topic of great interest to me…liminality. As I understand it (and that qualifier should be taken as a sincere expression of my limits) Turner was at or near the beginning of the topic. The interest arises from my interest in the topic of the nature, interpretation and generation of meaning. Hermeneutics deals with the interpretation of a text in its limited definition but actually applies to any deciphering act of an engaged reality. Hermeneutics…Hermes… the god of boundaries and transitions…portals…limens…liminality. Turner elaborates the back-and-forth transition between structure and anti-structure in the human frame of reference. As an artist, the subject is interesting to me as I feel that an understanding of the structure and epistemology of meaning allows a certain ability to reverse engineer it into my attempt to structure a meaningful work of art

I am answering this question in its most literal sense, meaning that I am answering it with the book in mind that inspired in the sense of motivating to action. It compelled me through a phase transition from solid to liquid. It pushed me to move from wanna-be artist to I’ve got to be an artist. And for some ten years it is a book I reread every year; in fact, it is the only book I have ever done that with. The book is The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather. I don’t read it anymore on an annual basis but I love the memory of it and my relationship to it. There is a revelatory moment in Thea Kronberg’s life when her calling becomes manifest. At that moment it became manifest for me as well. And so my emphasis moved from talking and thinking about past art to working out the steps toward realizing a life of art making

I would probably give that designation to Umberto Eco’s dissertation. I was writing a paper in my junior year in college on the aesthetics of early Cistercian architecture. The professor, under whose watchful eye the paper was completed, recommended a book on medieval aesthetics by Umberto Eco. That began a love affair with both his academic work and his literary work. (I remember reading Baudolino with great fondness and a particular passage from Foucault’s Pendulum has inspired a number of my paintings

The books of the last 6 months are all mentioned in other places in these responses. I am a consistent but slow reader. I do not see the finishing of a book as an achievement. If I could go slightly beyond that timeframe I would say that reading Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo was the kind of reading experience that was fundamentally transformative. There are parts of that book that still echo in my head. Just an amazing and transformative experience.

The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas by Umberto Eco.

My humanity would demand that I say my familial relationships, but humanity has little to no interest for me outside of said immediate familial relationships. So, I offer another answer. My proudest achievement is the last painting I finished. It is my proudest achievement until the next completed painting. I have done this long enough and cycled through the emotional and psychological structure of this pride that I really don’t feel proud any longer. I just keep doing. I just keep moving. I rarely, if ever remove myself from the process long enough to make the evaluation that might elicit pride. I just keep moving.

Firstly I’d select Albrecht Dürer, because he helped me conceive of myself as an artist and because I feel his Self Portrait painted in 1500 and currently in Munich is one of the greatest paintings ever made, (2) JMW Turner…because his painting in Cleveland, “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons,” is the physical embodiment of my interest in art and philosophy (as expressed best in Michel Serres essay from the early Hermes series on Carnot); and, (3) Vincent van Gogh…because his “Self Portrait” of 1888 dedicated to Paul Gauguin reminds me that my daily pursuit is a calling an not a profession…a religious pursuit of fundamental depth and unending process.

I make an effort to leave no remnants of my intimate mental and emotional life laying around the public parts of my house. In fact, I do not even have a coffee table to leave them on. Surfaces parallel to the floor collect the detritus of the day and dust. I am opposed to surfaces parallel to the floor for this very reason. My books are events in my interior life. They live with the rest of my interior existence in my studio.

I would tell the aspiring artist to remember that each “thing” put out in the world is the medium through which we…the ones experiencing the “thing”…conceptualize the aspiration. Never compromise on the “thing” put into the world. Don’t be the limit of your own aspiration. (2) Realize that you don’t choose to be an artist once. You choose it again and again and again. And that decision becomes harder and harder and harder as practicality and life intrude on the idealism of life. Do not be deterred by this constant need to re-choose, under the weight of actuality, your idealism.

Setting aside the fact that I have no garden and despite all the efforts necessary to cultivate one, I would showcase humanity through the following 3 books: (1) The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri…from the low to the high of humanity, literally, (2) Ulysses by James Joyce…because I loved the reading of it and continue to love the continued thinking about it; and, (3) The Complete Poems by Emily Dickinson…because I just love the poems.

Books that I have the greatest memories of having read: The Luzhin Defense by Vladimir Nabokov, Petersburg by Andrei Bely, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, Federico Garcia Lorca and E. E. Cummings. I am sure there are others but these are books not mentioned in other answers that have resonated with me over years and, in some cases, decades.

Without a doubt on both a personal and a historical level. Books are the starting point for most of my paintings. Historically, literary narrative…whether classical or biblical…has spurred visual language. The relationship has changed in contemporary times. While the relationship now might not be so superficial (not meant in a pejorative way) the dialogue still remains vital.

I used to have a stack of coming attractions but what I have found is that the thread of ideas does not follow the books in the stack. Because of this, I have done away with the stack. I can get most books these days that would follow from the thread no matter how esoteric in a matter of a couple days. I love this removal of limits of place as regards my interior life. I guess the answer to this will be the answer to my next interview with The Reading Lists.