Editor’s note: Airstream will host a fine art invitational exhibit of landscape art, May 31-June 5, at its headquarters in Jackson Center. This is one in a series of stories that will profile the artists whose work will be shown.
SIDNEY — When an artist’s painting doesn’t turn out the way he’d hoped it would, when it just doesn’t work and just isn’t any good, it’s called a “dog.”
Antonio Masi, of New York City, paints a series of up to 12 watercolors to get one good one. And what happens to a dog?
“I put it under the bed and hope the dog doesn’t howl,” he laughed. “If it howls, I pull it out to find out why.”
Does that happen often?
“I hope not,” he laughed some more.
It’s doubtful there are many paintings under Masi’s bed. His work is in museums in the U.S. and China and regularly garners awards in exhibitions across the country.
He is known for capturing bridges, especially New York City bridges, in watercolor. In the beginning, it was in homage to his grandfather, who was on the crew that built Manhattan’s 59th Street Bridge in the early 1900s. But after a decade and a half of painting bridges, Masi continues to mine the massive structures for subjects and themes, putting his appreciation of what they stand for into every picture.
“They’re the reason we have the country we have,” he said by phone recently. “They are in many ways the lifeline for us. I look at them as a living thing.”
In a statement on his website, www.antoniomasi.com, he writes, “When possible, I walk every bridge that I paint. I study the history and architecture of each bridge.” He loves that the bridges hold the island of Manhattan to the rest of the world.
Masi emigrated at age 7 with his family from Italy to New York. He attended the High School of Industrial Art, where he met the sweetheart who would become his wife. He and Elizabeth have been married for 54 years. He graduated from the School of Visual Art and, later, from City University of New York.
As he and Elizabeth raised their three children, he took jobs as a commercial artist at art agencies and for various publications. He taught art at his alma mater and eventually became a partner in a well-respected graphic arts and printing business.
He sold that business in 2000, after 40 years of service, to become a full-time watercolorist.
“I started out in oil. It did not allow me to do the things I wanted to do. You put down oil and it stays there. You put down watercolor and the nature of water brings something surprising to the painting. It’s organic. You look at the drips. You know right away that it’s water,” he said.
Masi’s paintings literally drip with paint. Sometimes the drips are fortuitous. Sometimes, they’ve been meticulously planned and applied with an eyedropper.
“There’s a certain amount of the unexpected in watercolor,” Masi said. “When you see the watercolor doing something you like, you let it go. When you don’t like it, you stop it. Water moves with its own life. If you’re conscious of that and aware that the unexpected can happen, you can use that and allow the painting to have more life to it.”
Some of this artist’s work is quite detailed. Some is quite abstract, offering just a hint, a ghost or a whisper of the massive structures anchored just out of reach, perhaps only in memory.
“The approach I take is dictated by the subject. When I look at something, it could be the detail or the overall shape or the mood. On a rainy day or dark days, the mood takes over,” he said. What he sees gives him the clues he needs to decide what a painting might look like.
“The most difficult (ones) to me are the ones with the least amount of detail. It’s easier to put things into a painting than to take things out,” he added.
That’s where the series come into play. Masi starts with a detailed painting and then, through a combination of washing and scrubbing out and starting anew, he strips away and strips away to reach what he calls “the essentials.”
“It’s difficult to keep eliminating things to reach that point where (the painting) still works without it’s falling apart,” he said. He works on three iterations of a theme at a time. And he paints, as he says, “large,” taking 40 to 60 hours to complete the final artwork.
His detailed works begin with detailed drawings, but for his abstracts, he starts right off with paint. He works from sketches that he makes on location, sometimes from photos, and usually from memory. Elizabeth is amazed that his tiny sketches result in paintings that are 5 feet high.
“He’s got a sketch book that’s 3 inches by 4 inches,” she said. Elizabeth was a commercial artist, doing fashion illustration and story boards for commercials. Now she, too, is a full-time artist, but her genre is portraits in oil. The couple critiques each other’s work, “when we’re asked,” Elizabeth said. “It gives us a different perspective. We agree or we don’t agree. But we love each other’s art and we respect it, too.”
She has nothing but praise for her husband.
“He’s extremely talented. I think he’s a genius,” she said. Masi is the president of the American Watercolor Society and Elizabeth lauds his ability to lead the prestigious organization.
“He was a businessman before, so he’s a very good president,” she noted. “And he has an eye for other people’s art.”
The other person’s art he’d like to own, if he could have anything ever done, would be a painting — any painting — by Diego Velazquez.
“To me, he is the painter for other painters. What he’s able to do is just phenomenal. He has a brush stroke style — he could take a four-petal flower and he can paint those four petals in only three strokes,” an awed Masi said. Is that the kind of thing that Masi finds challenging?
“I’m still looking for that one painting (of my own) that I’m going to love. Until I reach that point, everything is a challenge. I hope I never find it,” he said. “I love to paint.”
