Anthony Apesos


Anthony Apesos is an American painter and professor of Fine Arts at the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University.

Biography

Apesos was born on 6 January 1953 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of John and Helen Apesos. Later that year, his family returned to Philadelphia, where his parents were restaurateurs. Apesos attended The Episcopal Academy from 1965 to 1972, after which he received his A.B. at Vassar College in Religion. Apesos studied painting under Morris Blackburn, Arthur de Costa, Ben Kamahira, and Sidney Goodman at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1975 to 1979, and received a M.F.A. in 1991 from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. In 1992, Apesos moved to Boston, and became chair of the Fine Arts department at the Art Institute of Boston. Apesos founded AIB's M.F.A. program, and currently is professor of Fine Arts.

Work

Apesos's painting, while indebted to the American realist tradition, is informed by a fascination with mythology and archetypical themes; in this respect, his work exhibits striking parallels with the visual art of the Romantic poet and artist William Blake. Technically, Apesos draws upon the traditions of late Renaissance painting, in particular that of the Venetian masters; his work is characterized by the employment of opalescent scumbles, and inventive, often unsettling modes of composition in which figures and background are juxtaposed in simultaneously traditional and unfamiliar ways.

Representative paintings

: composed with a fundamental palette of red, black, and white, and evoking both ancient pictorial traditions as well as archetypal symbolism to reflect upon the fundamental and yet mysterious nature of human reproduction, focused here upon the powerful and compositionally-central figure of the mother.

Exhibits, presentations, and publications