Featured Artist: Anthony Surratt

by Janelle Faignant

There isn’t necessarily a plan when it starts.

Actually, “I prefer to start without a plan,” Anthony Surratt said, and two of his paintings in the recent Chaffee show ‘Connections’ started with newspapers from the 1980s.

“My dad was a truck driver and would bring me home newspapers from across the country,” he said. He was a teenager at the time and these were the days before the internet and hundreds of channels on TV, so the newspapers were a lifeline.

“I’d read them cover to cover and carefully save them,” he said. “I ended up with hundreds of them.”

Now, 40-some years later he not only still has them, they are an important part of his work.

“The theme of the show was connections, and I really thought about how I connected with my father,” he said. “He wasn’t an artist per se but he was very creative. He taught himself how to build and he built a house single-handedly out of granite.”

Anthony got a masters degree at Maine College of Art and Design recently and during the second year of the program his father sadly passed away. 

“I was starting to work on my thesis and it became so much about my father’s influence,” he said. “He was one of these guys whose motto was ‘don’t throw that away, I might need it again someday,’ and he truly lived by that adage.” Some of the things he left behind were tubs of screws and nuts and bolts that he was sure he would need again. It turns out, someone did.

“I made a sculpture out of them,” Anthony said. And the newspapers can be found in a lot of his work, too.

“From a practical matter I love newspapers,” he said. “I love the texture you can get with them. I crumple them up and laminate them into my surface, just multiple layers, and I love excavating through them.” 

The painting titles often come from what text from the newspaper peeks through on the final surface.

“There was some text from an ad in a newspaper that said ‘at no extra cost,’ with an asterisk so that became a title,” he said.

He also held on to house and garden magazines from the 1950s that made their way into several paintings. “You get a whole different aesthetic,” he said. 

On a deeper level the artwork is cathartic, digging through layers of the past, on canvas.

“A lot of my paintings I’ll indiscriminately add layers of paint and other material and it’s not until I’ve built up a lot of layers and then start digging through them that the painting starts to emerge for me,” he said. “And I love that surprise, how a layer that you added many steps ago will interact with a more recent layer and create surprise juxtaposition.”

“Connecting to my late father through those newspapers that he brought me from the road years and years ago was really a healing experience,” he said. “I like that element of art being able to be catharsis to deal with whatever feelings you’re feeling and bring them to the surface through art.”

You can see more of his work in the current Chaffee show as well, mixed media renditions of flowers that almost look like stained glass.

“It’s great that Chaffee has as many shows as they do and provides opportunities for artists to show,” he said. “It’s all about getting your work out there.”