William Anzalone
the shapes and shadows of memory

by Jerrell Bullis
Southwest Art Magazine, March 1982

When William Anzalone gave up architecture — only three years out of M.I.T. — and moved south to Houston to become a painter, he had no idea that his future would be dominated by the human figure, in particular the female figure. He began painting with almost no training in art, for two years experimented with non-figurative styles, and then realized that his work was becoming more and more involved with the female form. Now, twenty-two years after that beginning, his paintings deal with a narrow range of subjects: one woman, two, sometimes also a dog. There is magic in the human figure, but Anzalone’s conjuring art evokes much more than the usually solitary female figure that focuses his oils and pastels.

Anzalone, his wife, and his daughter moved to Houston in 1959. Two years working as an architect taught the Brooklyn native that he did not want to work in an office. So his interest shifted to painting, just as it had earlier moved from metallurgy to architecture. “Architecture was to metallurgy what painting was to architecture,” he explains. “It was just one step toward individualizing what I thought I wanted to do. If you go into pure creation, it has to be in the arts.”

A friend from college has mentioned a garage apartment Anzalone and his family could live in while he painted, so they headed south with their possessions — about $700 and two or three suitcases. They reached Houston and the garage, only to find that, while the garage was real, the apartment existed only in his friend’s imagination. After three months were spent trying to fix up the garage, Anzalone — now down to about $10 — found a small apartment and a job teaching part-time in the art department of the University of Houston. He also began painting.

“I just started painting,” he remembers. “It seemed like a reasonable thing to do. It was just trying this and that, because I had no formal education in art. I never went to art school, and I had no idea, other than what historical information I had, as to what an artist really is. I took a brief art history course in college, but it was mainly about architecture rather than art. We just started buying [art] books and looking around and going to galleries. Eventually I fixed on the figure because I saw that that was what I was usually doing.”

Anzalone did some “non-figurative” painting since “that was what freedom meant. Finally, however, the young artist decided that non-figurative painting was, in the end, decorative, and his attention turned to the idea of form in figure painting. His training in architecture helped, giving him “at least a degree of organizational ability.” Just as important, be began to pay more attention to the past.

“If you look at the history of art for 2,000 years,” he says, careful to add that he means Western art, “there was a direct line for 1,900 of thouse 2,000 years. It is a straight line, where one thing is added to another, like a stack of blocks, one on top of the other.” At the end of the last century, however, painting began to follow many different, experimental paths. Most of those, Anzalone thinks, have reached dead ends: “Pop art was a major event but it ended; abstract expressionism is a major event that ended,” he says. As all these “answers” to the question of the future of art appeared, traditional figurative art was submerged, alive but not attracting much attention.

“Young artists and students are drawn to thos alternate paths,” the college professor says. The mentality of the art world today encourages young artists to search for “some clean idea that nobody’s trampled all up yet and to use that as their way into the art world. I far prefer to say that I work with ideas that people have been working with for thousands of years. I’m not going to try to do anything new [to that tradition] — I’m just an individual working within it, and the result has to be different because I’m different from anyone else.”

Just because the concept of change is no issue for him does not mean that his work has been static. In fact it has not been confined completely to figure painting. Only a few years ago he began to move away from the idea of an organization which focuses on an object in the canvas. “I tried to have a surface focus,” he says. A series of circus paintings resulted. Tent posts, ropes and lines, trapeze artists and their suspended equipment, seen from a distant viewpoint, form various geometric patterns on the canvas. The painting are interesting, but Anzalone found them another dead end.

A principle reason for Anzalone’s dissatisfaction with the circus paintings is his feeling that too much of what goes into non-figurative painting is arbitrary. “I don’t like arbitrary things in my paintings, “ he says. “It comes down to the fact that I don’t like to put a mark over there and then say ‘That’s a nice mark, I’ll leave it there.’ There is nothing arbitrary about the length of an arm. Either the arm is the right length for the body, or it’s wrong.”

Getting the figure correct is the least of Anzalone’s worries. He expends most of his energy trying to achieve a sound form for the picture as a composition , using the female figure as his focus. “I spend most of my time pushing things around in the picture,” he says. “The figure is never the problem that I have; it’s getting the damn environment to fit so that I have essentially a unit.”

Although he completes three or four paintings per month, on the average each is painted several times. He likes to complete a picture in one session and refuses to spend time tinkering with details. “What I do usually when I am painting is get lost,” he says. “I try to finish the picture each time I work on it, but I never succeed; it’s one of those things. Every time I paint it and I finish with it, I never like it. I mean I like it for a second, and then I think, ‘Oh God, that’s wrong and that’s wrong and that’s wrong.’”

Instead of trying to doctor the picture, he selects a color, mixes it with turpentine, and wipes the canvas down with a rag. The technique is helpful: “That tends to lighten the dark areas and darken the light areas, but I can still see the essential picture there,” Anzalone says. The I start repainting it. But I have to do that from scratch. So the next time I pick it up, rather than just fiddle with the picture, I just start the whole damn thing again.”

The effect on his style is major. Although his figures and their environment are clearly realistic, thay are not highly detailed. The figures are well-rounded and the rooms have depth, but the walls and bulky pieces of furniture are plain and tend to be more important for their color and position than for their detail. Largely because of the repeated wipe-downs in the progress of the painting, one color usually becomes predominate. While his colors gain extra highlights by being put on in layers, the tones are muted and become important most of all for their evocative qualities: The suggestion of meditation present in many of the paintings comes not from the figure’s actions or positions, but from the subtle range of tones in the colors, which gives the paintings the atmosphere of being remembered. Even though Anzalone works consciously to have his figures frozen but not posed — as though caught not in motion, but at the moment before motion begins — the result is less suggestive of a photograph than of memory.

Also contributing to that quality in Anzalone’s picture is the degree of reality that the artist has chosen to work with. “There’s no horizon in the pictures,” he explains, “but there is a feeling that things are placed level with the figure. There is a sense of light that comes in that has to be the same on the figure that is it on the other objects. So, in essence, the pictures are abstract to me since I don’t copy photographs, but they are also real because I have a set of relationships that I have to deal with sooner or later. I like the fact that there is both a tangible nature to the reality of the situation and the intangible that I can make these things any kind of interior space I want. The shadow has to be there because I want it to be real enough so that people don’t question me about it, but I want it to be abstract enough so that they know that it’s not totally real. I’m not out to paint a realistic chair or a realistic table; I’m merely out to paint a believable environment.”

His concern these days is something very traditional in nature and very technical. “I do not like the horizontal planes,” he says. “But I tend to use them more and more to get the figure farther back in the canvas. What I would like to do is cut the figure off at the knees, but still have it appear to be immersed in the paint of the canvas. I’ve tried it an I’ve tried it and I’ve tried it ... I may have succeeded in doing it at times but I can’t point to a specific time and say ‘I did it there.’ Each one of these pictures to me is a monstrous failure.” he says, gesturing to the paintings-in-progress on the walls of his large, all-white studio. “I keep painting them and painting them as best I can, and I don’t quite know how to deal with the problem. I can put an object in front of the model to set the figure in space, but I simple cannot get that figure back in the canvas without relying on the floor surface or some physical device to do it.”

Anzalone’s work has been associated with Meredith Long & Co. in Houston for more that twenty years and has been displayed throughout Texas, Massachusetts, New York City, and in several cities in Mexico. It is present in several dozen collections. In 1980 he became a full professor in the art department of the University of Houston. And the quiet, pensive figures in his paintings — a woman fastening her shoe or putting cans on the kitchen shelf, a nude standing alone in an empty space of a brown canvas — show that Anzalone has found the slightly submerged but sound foundation he was looking for in the 2,000-year tradition of Western art.