DeBlasi: ’60s passions survive on canvas

Anthony DeBlasi may not look like it, but he describes himself as “a child of the ’60s.” And that has had a profound effect on his artwork.

DeBlasi is 47, a small, lithe man with a distinguishing quantity of gray sneaking into his beard. He is also a Michigan State University art professor with an impressive record for winning competitions.

Back in 1970, he won first prize in a statewide contest sponsored by the Detroit Institute of Arts. Now he has won a similar award.

The structure of the contest has changed, and DeBlasi’s latest win goes like this: He will be one of 82 artists featured at a Southwest Michigan exhibit that opens July 23 and runs for eight weeks at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. And he’s one of only five from that region who will be featured at the Detroit Institute of Arts in the fall of 1981.

Most unusual. perhaps, is the fact that the two wins came with sharply-differing styles. But then, that difference reflects changes in DeBlasi’s own life.

He is, after all, a relative latecomer. A native of Sicily, he emigrated lo America with his family when he was five. After high school he was in the Navy, he cut meat, he studied to be a dental technician. Then he returned to his original love of art

He was 33 when he finally received his faculty job at MSU. That was a vibrant time to be on campus, and the once-apolitical DeBlasi became active in anti-war protests.

And that started to affect his work “I think that as life became more hectic on the outside, I had a need for a certain amount of order and control. So t started to put that into my work.”

Back then, all of his works involved delicate strokes for carefully-planned results. He figures his ’70 winner took him about 200 hours.

But the protest years vanished, the world settled down and DeBlasi began putting his own life in order. By now, he has quit smoking, he has divorced and remarried, he has moved to a house that’s close enough so he can walk to work every day.

And as his life becomes more controlled, his work becomes less so.

“I want to have a kind of looseness in my work,” DeBlasi says. “Actually, they still have to be carefully planned, but I want them to feel loose and free.”

His new style looks. very simply, like someone has squeezed large gobs of acrylic paint onto a canvas. To accomplish it DeBlasi uses everything from his own handmade squirters to a 69-cent dusting brush from Meijer’s.

The results are canvasses that virtually dance with colors – that even have the colors flying on past the borders. And the result is the kind or vibrancy that a child of the ’60s might need nowadays.