Tony de Carlo's amazing artistry...

Self-portrait

Tony de Carlo is a native of Los Angeles, California, now residing in New Mexico, between Santa Fe and Albuquerque.
He has been painting every day for the last thirty years. A self-taught artist, he began learning by drawing and painting in journals as a young teenager, each day expressing himself through his visual diaries. Although he abandoned his journals fifteen years ago to work solely on canvas and wood, he continues treating his canvases like pages from his diary, reflecting and expressing his day-to-day life and experiences in his work.

Most of the subjects in his paintings are people he knows personally, and the backgrounds contain elements from his life; his home, his dogs, his city, his neighbourhood park, his gardens and his relationships. He never does any preliminary drawings for his work, but rather makes the attempt to let something flow out from within him.
Some of his work mixes religious iconography with homoerotism. Beautiful portraits and other images blend elements of sensuality, religion, spirituality, and nature with Southern Californian, Mexican and Mexican-American ethnic and artistic sensibilities. Tony's extraordinary talent combines these influences and elements, and a brilliant use of colours to produce his unique vision.

His work is exhibited regularly in museums and galleries throughout the USA, and his paintings are in collections around the world. They have been exhibited at (among others):

Arizona State University (Tempe)
Art Museum of South Texas (Corpus Christi)
California State University Los Angeles
Dezart One Gallery (Palm Springs)
Encantada Gallery of Fine Arts (San Francisco)
Galeria de la Raza (San Francisco)
Jose Galvez Gallery (Tucson)
Liz Blackman Gallery (Hollywood)
Mexican-American Cultural Art Center (Tucson, Arizona)
Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts (San Francisco)
Palm Springs Desert Museum (California)
Plaza de la Raza (Los Angeles)
The Frye Art Museum (Seattle)
The Mexican Museum (San Francisco)
University of the Arts (Philadelphia)

Sunflowers in a Blue Vase