Artist Creates An Accidental Vision

On one side of the NewAlliance Art Gallery there’s a painting of a ship, another painting of a happy family. On the other side of the gallery, there’s another painting of a ship — except this one is sailing through space, heading to a distant star. And on the wall nearby, two gargantuan paintings that offer a vertiginous bird’s‑eye view of nothing less than a vision for the future.

It’s all part of a 45-year retrospective of Tony Falcone, who calls himself an ​“accidental artist,” but has a novelist’s eye for telling stories of the past, and sharing visions of the future.

“Accidental Artist” runs at the NewAlliance Art Gallery at Gateway Community College through Feb. 14.

Before Falcone was a painter, he was a New Haven firefighter; he served fires for seven years. Then, in 1974, as his biography puts it, Falcone ​“discovered his love of mural painting and left the Fire Department to establish his studio in a vintage dairy barn located in Prospect.” One of his first murals appeared in his firehouse. Subsequent murals appeared in the Yale Law School and the Peabody Museum, the Floyd Little Field House at Hillhouse High School, and Albertus Magnus College in New Haven. Even more publicly, he painted an ad for Tyco Printing on the side of a building in New Haven, and was responsible for the gargantuan mural of racehorses that appears on the curved surface of Sports Haven at Long Wharf.

He did murals for the Bank of Paris in Manhattan and for downtown Old Saybrook, among other places. He lined up commissions for executive portraits at institutions in New Haven and elsewhere, and — as the exhibit shows — began a series of paintings for the Coast Guard Academy in New London.

One of them — a realistic counterpart to the spacefaring vessel in Solar Solitude — shows Falcone’s (self-taught) craft at producing figurative paintings. He also imbues the painting with a kind of pride that the accompanying notes explain. The ship in the painting is the Eagle, which has served as a training vessel, a ​“seagoing classroom for future officers of the Coast Guard … it is on the decks and in the rigging of the Eagle that these young men and women get their first taste of salt air and life at sea. The experience helps them to develop skills of leadership and teamwork, as well as a healthy respect for the elements that will serve them for a lifetime.” The text also reveals that ​“as guest of the Commander, artist Falcone travelled for eight days on Eagle, from Jacksonville, Fla. to Bermuda, during which time he conducted research for the painting by accompanying cadets on their daily training routines including climbing the masts and furling/unfurling the sails.” That respect for the work flows into Falcone’s other Coast Guard-commissioned paintings of ships in action, whether storming the beaches at Normandy during WWII, conducting rescue missions at sea, or ferrying people away from Lower Manhattan during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. All of the paintings convey the same sense of respect for the work being done, and a belief in the mission that borders on hope.

Falcone’s straightforward craft and positive sensibilities thus get an extra layer added to them when he applies his eye to more fanciful subjects. There are humorous still lifes of objects of shelves that feature, say, an R2D2 figurine amid a jar full of marbles, a candlestick, and a box of jasmine tea. Another similar painting has an Anakin Skywalker figurine sharing space with a lava lamp. But — as his mural work suggests — Falcone also likes to think big, a sense of scale he puts to use in Out For A Spin, which is, in a word, fun. Interesting how a casually futuristic ride in a flying cart makes an aerial painting of a golf course suddenly more compelling to look at. It raises lighthearted questions. Is this how everyone will get around a golf course in the future? Or is the cart from somewhere else? Did they escape from an amusement park? Or is it still possible to dream of a future that includes flying cars?

Falcone’s grander scale and sense of fun and positivity come to their fullest realization in the two gargantuan paintings that dominate the room and the exhibition. Neauleaf at first looks like a detailed painting of the leaves of lilypads.

But closer examination reveals that there are cities in the drops of water resting on the leaves, cities under the surface of the pond. What is most remarkable about these cities — apart from their scale — is the ease with which they exist in the environment around them. There’s no pollution, no corrosion, no piles of waste. Just life existing with life.

Neauearth offers the same sense of harmony, both on a grand scale (the land and water are in the rough shapes of a man and a woman) and on the human scale, even as seen from the air. All is bright and clear. The town is contained, the shield like another drop of water. The land is verdant and wild around them. Boats sail on crystalline waves. It’s dizzying to contemplate, and not just because of the aerial view.

“These paintings — painted in 1977 — were and still are meant to depict a positive and exciting view of the future,” Falcone writes in an accompanying statement. ​“In the future our ability to deal with ourselves and the environment will be more harmonious than at present. We will continue to strive for excellence in life.” With political chaos and looming environmental disaster as fixtures in the news, such a future seems almost impossible. But Falcone’s vision of it makes it seem closer. His vast optimism, in such short supply these days, makes a little more room for hope.

“Accidental Artist” runs at the NewAlliance Art Gallery at Gateway Community College, 20 Church St., through Feb. 14. The gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. Admission is free.