* All images used with permission. Please do not distribute without first contacting the artist.
Tony Chimento is a realist painter who built his career in Miami over the last 20 years after arriving from the Northeast. Born and raised in New Jersey, he graduated from Rutgers University. After graduating, he moved to Woodstock, NY and began his career as an artist. Presently, he is resident artist of Art Center/ South Florida. He serves on the board of directors there.
His work comprises extremely detailed and complex interior and still life scenes of amazing detail, clarity and color.
Tony describes his work by saying, “As a young man at college I was encouraged to accept the notion that art could only be valid if it somehow “pushed the envelope”. To be avant-garde and new seemed by far the most important criterion to my professors. However, it seemed to me that once that art-historical time line ended in the late 60’s with the minimal artists and the final blank white canvas, then the whole idea of artists making marks on canvas should have ended along with it. As we all know it didn’t. For me, that began to erode the power that the so called “Avant-Garde” held in my thinking about my validity as a realist painter and opened the door for new ways of thinking about art along with my own self- respect as an artist. I began to be aware on a conscious level of something which was always there intuitively: that my work is mostly about the exploration if beauty and the space we make for its contemplation. In a world where the ugly and violent seem increasingly more intense, the exploration of beauty and serenity, not as escape…but as antidote, certainly must be as valid a reason for making art as any other.”
