I’m Tony - An artist based in based in Liverpool, UK.
Half English, and half Italian… Hello, and ciao!
Born in the early nineties in a medium sized town in the north west of England.
In 2012 I graduated from LJMU with a degree in graphic arts.
I have completed a variety of commissions since then, which also includes animation.
My spare time has been very much consumed with creating personal work as often as I feasibly can - A labour of love that I feel to be a compulsory part of my life.
My personal works are usually a combination of watercolour crayons and inks. These water soluble crayons were introduced to me by my high school art teacher, and I haven’t put them down since.
I sometimes feel that these images are the accompanying illustration for some sort of lost mythology. Distant stories that I have a cloudy understanding of, but I’m only able to try and communicate them in this visual manner.
Early man told stories, that would be passed through generations, and eventually become myth. They tapped into a reservoir of primordial wisdom and knowledge, and conveyed all of this via stories and archetypes. It’s difficult to truly discern the origin of ancient myths of this kind. They made sense of the world in a pre-science, pre-enlightenment age - An explanation of the invisible forces that shape our existence.
There’s no clearly defined meaning to my work. No overt message of any ideological, moral or political nature. No causes I’m trying to get behind. No discernible narrative or story that i’m trying to tell or retell. In these ways, there is nothing happening intentionally at all. Any meaning conveyed in these images, is conveyed entirely involuntarily.
Words aren’t really on my mind when these ideas take shape - Just images. I’ve never been one to explain my work very much.
I may sometimes exhaustively contemplate the composition, but I don’t ruminate over the content a great deal. That tends to come to me like some sort of cryptic message from my subconscious; sometimes fully formed, but often not, and the rest of it organically grows from the original seed. It’s very much an endeavour of intuition, rather than logic and rationale.
I’d like to think that these images are my humble attempt to convey a transmission from the primordial subconscious, brought to life in a ritual of sketching and colouring.
We never get a clear direct line to this ‘primordial subconscious’ that I speak of. It will always be flawed by limitations of human understanding; filtered through a particular cultural backdrop, and seasoned with the idiosyncrasies of the individual.
In 2023 I had my long debut awaited solo exhibition, “Unwritten Myths” at FutureYard in Birkenhead - Where these drawings emerged from their hiding place in my home studio. They were no longer little thumbnails on social media. They had emerged into the light of the public gaze, and had been mounted on to the walls of a gallery.
This is a showreel I spliced together to accompany my debut solo exhibition, “Unwritten Myths”. It’s a scrapbook of audio & footage that I felt resonated with me and my art.
