ARTIST BIOS:
Tony Faiola is an American painter/printmaker, designer, and scientist from New York who lives and works in Cincinnati. Faiola’s work explores the abstraction of simplified objects in architectural space, what he refers to as meta-statements on geometric form, with themes inspired by health and the human condition. Faiola’s work and lecturing abroad has deeply inspired and informed his understanding of the mental health of its citizens, as reflected in his work. Originally trained as a printmaker, he gravitated toward painting in the late 1970s.
Faiola received his fine arts education: BFA (SUNY New Paltz), MA (SUNY Albany), and MFA (Ohio State University) in printmaking and mixed media. He later received his MA (Ohio State University) in design and his PhD (Purdue University) in Communication. He studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino, Italy in 1976, and is a three-time Fulbright Scholar to Russia in 2000, 2002, and 2003 in Communication.
His most recent group exhibitions include the Indianapolis Art Gallery, Indianapolis, IN (painting: The Healthy Patient), GFAA Gallery, Gainesville, FL (painting: Mental Health, v2 – Best in Show), and University Museum, Albany (giclée print: People Alone). Faiola has been working on a new body of work, which he is currently promoting.
Tony is also a health scientist who designs mobile and gaming health technologies to improve the lives of patients suffering from poor mental health and cognitive impairment. Like many artists, past and present (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, Anicka Yi, Neri Oxman, Edward Tufte), Tony finds divergent thinking between art and science, as a means to maximize his intellectual curiosity in seeking new visual forms. Find his university faculty page HERE.
ARTIST STATEMENT:
My work underscores my curiosity with simplified objects in space that represent statements on the human condition. These ideas and conjectures have come primarily from my observation of a growing sense of loneliness and mental anguish that pervades society, both in the U.S. and around the world. Much of these considerations grew out of my many years of living in and traveling to Russia (1991 to 2018). These notions have increased over the last five years since traveling to China, India and Saudi Arabia, and most strongly throughout and following the COVID pandemic.
It is also important to note that I am a health scientist, which puts me in different clinical environments where I regularly observe patients who are very ill, e.g., with cancer or pulmonary infections. My observation of these patients and their family members has had a considerable impact on my empathy for those who are suffering. Being a patient in critical care is a very lonely experience, cut off from one’s community and family, and the world you know. Because I am an artist and scientist, I’ve chosen to communicate in abstract terms my feelings through art.
Through the use of health-related titles, my work becomes a dialogue about our empathy for the frailty of human life and our endless quest to transform it. Because understanding the condition of humanity is difficult to grasp, I believe it is best to represent it through the implicit interactions of objects, shapes, colors, dimensions, and textures, rather than through representational imagery. Technically, my work includes paintings created in oil, acrylic, encaustic on canvas and paper. My work also includes giclée prints and drawings.
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Note: Much of my thinking on this topic has been further confirmed after reading two published studies, titled: Mental pain as a global person-centered outcome measure (2021)[i] and Chronic pain and mental health (2018).[ii] In many cases, these ideas have informed the titles of my art.
[i] Cosci F, Mansueto G, Benemei S, Chiarugi A, De Cesaris F, Sensky T. Mental pain as a global person-centered outcome measure. CNS Spectr. 2021 Jul 27:1-7. doi: 10.1017/S1092852921000699. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34311805.
[ii] Kohrt BA, Griffith JL, Patel V. Chronic pain and mental health: integrated solutions for global problems. Pain. 2018 Sep;159 Suppl 1(Suppl 1):S85-S90. doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001296. PMID: 30113952; PMCID: PMC6130207.
Photo Credit: Photo taken on the Great Wall, China, 2011.