Fabulous Peculiarities: The Art of Tony Calzetta

Tom Smart

Mar 2015 · The Porcupine's Quill

About this ebook

Over the past four decades, Canadian artist Tony Calzetta has developed a bold style and a unique visual lexicon. In Fabulous Peculiarities, veteran author, art gallery director, curator and columnist Tom Smart teases out Calzetta’s many and varied artistic influences. Smart also examines how the artist has made efforts to engage audiences in the interpretation of his works, resulting in unique and complex visual narratives. As Smart explains, the culmination of this interest in visual narratives is Calzetta’s collaborative livre d’artiste created with award-winning poet Leon Rooke and printmaker Dieter Grund: a zany, surprising masterwork entitled How God Talks in His Sleep and Other Fabulous Fictions.

About the author

Author, art gallery director, curator, columnist and special advisor to art galleries and museums, Tom Smart is especially noted for his award-winning critical biographies, catalogues and monographs on Canadian artists. To date, Smart has written about painters Alex Colville, Christopher Pratt, Mary Pratt, Tom Forrestall, Miller Brittain and Fred Ross; graphic novelist George A. Walker; and sculptor John Hooper. Smart has worked in art galleries and museums across Canada and the United States, among them the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Frick in Pittsburgh, the Art Gallery of Sudbury and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection where he was Executive Director from 2006–2010. Smart’s essay 'The Wood Engravings of Rosemary Kilbourn' was recently published in the Devil’s Artisan. His bi-weekly column 'The Curator' appears in the Saint John Telegraph-Journal.