“An Interview with Tony DeBlasi Regarding Broken Loose”

Broken Loose (1976, fig. 1) a 80 x 80 inch acrylic painting, has a flat salmon­ sand colored 3- ½ inch ”frame” around a flat grey square.2 Over the central portion is a grid system of graded light-grey and black wax crayon dots. A focus of the light greys is at the center, giving a sense of glow from the center outward to the edges of the painting. Scattered over the “frame” are multicolored paint chips and some extruded lines of paint that sometimes slip out of the “frame” onto the grey area. The impression given is of active edges contrasting with and sometimes invading a quiet center.

Q:  Broken Loose is a provocative title: what breaks from what?

TD: I break from my past. There were new beginnings in my personal life and new beginnings in my painting. I opened myself up to new ideas and let old ones drop.

Q:  Can you be more specific?

TD:  From 1970-76, I worked within the context of the then prevalent school of color field painting. I accepted those traditions. My interest was to come to a deeper understanding of color and to find unique color associations which-through their subtlety of relationship-created emotional impact I covered large canvases-oh, 6 feet by 9 feet-with brush strokes. The pigment was laid down by controlled strokes. The work was tedious: it took roughly 200 hours over three or four months while I was teaching to complete a canvas. I got impatient. I needed feedback more often.

Q:  You wanted your colleague’s reaction to the work?

TD:  No, I needed a response from myself. I learn through doing, and each painting taught me something new. Each painting was like a sign post : the next painting, a learning experience. It was all taking too long. I was feeling an inner pressure to find a new form when I won the Founders’ Purchase Award at the Detroit institute of Arts. That was in 1970; in 1972  was the one-person show at the Detroit Institute of Arts and immediately following that the show at the Corcoran Gallery of Art after which came the Razor Gallery exhibit in New York City.

Q:  Impossible to change when this success was based on your current working method.

TD:  Yes, but I was aware of the need and began a quest for a new form.

Q:  From large canvases covered with strokes, the transition to Broken Loose seems abrupt. Where did the flat grid system come from?

TD:  I became intrigued by a photo of some archaeology students hovering over a large table subtly divided into squares with string. This grided surface was energized by randomly scattered shards of pottery. The image held my imagination. I began to work with it.

Q:  Did your message change with the new form?

TD:  The new form enlarged my scope. Color had been the product of early [19]70s work; now it became just one of several elements used to communicate emotions and attitudes about life. Movement as well as color became a major concern.

Q:  I remember the shimmery effect of the color paintings of the the [19]70s. Isn’t that movement?

TD:  Yes, but it was a movement expressed by my changing color, not by my changing the brush stroke, which was never varied. In the work after [l9]76, I introduced movement as gesture through the random scattering of paint chips and the directionality of extended lines of paint.

Q:  The paint chips were like the pottery shards you referred to earlier. They are a three-dimensional element on the canvas surface. Where did they come from?

TD:  They were chips made when I or my students cleaned our palettes of dried paint. I’d separate them into color groups and store them in gallon plastic buckets. I made the extruded lines by forcing paint from a cake­ decorating pastry tube which l later modified for longer and more varied lines. Both of these coloring methods freed me, expanded my concerns, and brought up new problems to deal with.

Q:  Can we see this in Broken Loose?

TD:  Yes, you can see the surface agitation I was looking for. I focused on energizing the surface with the paint chips and extruded lines, certainly a departure from my earlier work. The paint would be wet with a linear thrust. I’d strew the chips around making additions or subtractions as l went along. If the chips weren’t adhering, I’d use adhesive gel to fix them.

Q:  Did you actually change your outlook on painting?

TD:  I’d say yes. I allowed myself to finally become intuitive. Before, worked self-consciously, which resulted in an educated intuition. I allowed 1t free reign, Tallowed disorder to enter my work; I stopped “making sense.” I had no idea where all this was taking me. It was unnerving, but questioning and risk taking arc what life and art are about.

Q:  You left safe perimeters. 

TD: I broke loose.

Q:  Do you feel that you also were breaking from the continuity of European art history?

TD:  A trip to Spain in 1981 where I saw Moorish art for the first time made me wonder if my roots might not have been there all along–I am Spanish and Sicilian, after all. I felt in that art a reaffirmation of all that I had been doing. There was the surface energy, the three-dimensionality of bas relief. It rang an emotional bell. Although I was now less interested in repeated pattern, I felt a kinship in the formal means by which the Moors energized their surfaces. I accomplished that with my paint chips and extruded lines. My means were, of course, more expressionistic, accidental, random contrasted to their strict patterning.

Q:  And you replaced the overallness of color field painting with…

TD: …The unpredictable additions of color chips. In Broken Loose, I kept the activity on the edges, as though the chips were contained by the “frame.” I wanted another element, larger….

Q:  And that was when you hit on the idea of the extruded lines?

TD:  Yes, I ran the lines up and down the frame and moved them off the “frame” and onto the grid.

Q:  That had the effect of both tying the “frame” and grid together and also dismissing, or softening, the limiting function a frame usually has It seems a forecast of your work of the 1980s.

TD:  Yes, the extruded lines often represent the breaking of boundaries within the framework of the canvas; ultimately this led me to question t.- outer boundary and the rectangularity of the canvas itself.

Q:  So you have really.

TD:  “Broken Loose.”