Frank Arcuri
by Frank D. Quattrone
Black is mysterious, haunting, and beautiful. This is certainly true when you’ve mastered chiaroscuro, the artful contrast between shadow and light—a hallmark of the style of Frank Arcuri. More than a modern master of classically inspired still-life paintings, Arcuri has elevated the technique to a pinnacle rarely seen in today’s representational art.
Take, for instance, his painting of Leonardo, a beloved black-and-white cat the artist has known well. No mere fluffy lump asleep on a cozy carpet, Leonardo reclines, like a human counterpart, against the headboard of a comfortable bed, on a white blanket, his black tail and belly, his white hind paws, pink nose and inner ears, and his white muzzle clearly in view.
But you are first drawn to his eyes—his penetrating gaze, staring at the intrusion, challenging the onlooker, as if to say (think Robert De Niro’s protagonist in Taxi Driver), “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?” Clearly, Leonardo’s eyes are the painting’s prize. We’re drawn to them naturally because of the light reflected there. And it informs our experience with the work.
As Arcuri likes to tell his art students, “You’re not painting the object but the light falling on the object.” Perhaps his success as an art instructor, and certainly as an artist — his work appears in public and private collections worldwide, including places his solo exhibitions have garnered praise, like New York City, London, Hong Kong, and of course, Bucks County, where he teaches, lives, and paints — lies in this simple observation: “One of the biggest visual treats we have in life is a highlight.” He tells his students, “Paint the highlight first.”
Look again at Leonardo’s eyes and you understand the illusion, the game the artist plays with light and space. You’ll also begin to understand Arcuri’s so-called “value spectrum.” He says, pointedly, “I’m not afraid to go black. Without it, the contrast is not so strong. You’ll see everything from the brightest light to the mystery in the shadow. Color confuses values. I try to capture an aerial perspective, the air around the object.”
Clearly inspired by some of the greatest classical practitioners of chiaroscuro — among them Rembrandt, Caravaggio, and Velasquez — the Brooklyn-born artist was also influenced by several art instructors he studied with at the Art Students League in New York City, who led him to see the beauty in chiaroscuro.
For Arcuri, “The subject matter is the light. You’re painting the light pouring on it. “And don’t be afraid of the dark,” he admonishes his students, whom he teaches in three-hour oil-painting classes offered every day but Sunday in his charming Bucks County studio classroom, where each student works at a dedicated station, complete with special light source and still-life shelf. Although the classroom is full of statuary, wine bottles, old boots and mandolins, the students may bring their own objects, as Arcuri guides both serious beginners and advanced artists in the fundamental techniques of representational painting. They focus on color harmony and composition in the time-honored tradition of the still-life.
Also in his studio classroom are several original oils of barn swallows and other birds, painted by his talented wife, Margarie Arcuri, whose works are on view at Patricia Hutton Galleries, at 47 W. State Street in Doylestown, which is the setting for Frank Arcuri’s latest solo exhibition, featuring twenty new oil paintings, as well as many earlier works.
One painting you will surely enjoy is Arcuri’s Still Life with Lobster, a brilliant dance of bright highlights upon white-gray oyster shells in a basket between a hyper-real cooked lobster and coal-black mussel shells. While Arcuri’s work — accenting floral arrangements in decorative vases, pineapples, quince, and other fruits, Italian food on colorful platters, even a stately black-and-white pinto, and a defiant rabbit guarding a garden—is reminiscent of the old masters, it often has a decidedly modern edge, as in his oil on linen Let the Good Times Roll, featuring a sleek Fender electric guitar resting on a pliant sheet of canvas, or After Hours, where a jazz guitar, yellow pick shimmering prominently, lies on its stand, shadowed mysteriously, adjacent to the edge of a partially lighted piano. Arcuri, in his spare moments, enjoys playing bluesy standards on his guitar. He has studied music with renowned guitarist Joe Renzetti, who won a “Best Adaptation Score” Oscar for his work on The Buddy Holly Story.
Frank Arcuri has come a long way from the six-year-old who won a pair of roller skates for his prowess in a coloring book art contest sponsored by a popular Brooklyn cinema, to a modern master of the dramatic interplay in chiaroscuro. As he likes to tell his students, “The melody is in the light. The dark things are the chords behind the melody.”
For more information on Frank Arcuri and his art instruction, visit his website, https://frankarcuristudio.com, or call 267-614-4602. Frank’s upcoming solo exhibition will be at Patricia Hutton Galleries, 47 W. State Street, Doylestown, PA. The opening reception takes place on Saturday, October 20, from 5 to 8 p.m. For more information, call 215-348-1728.
Frank D. Quattrone is an author, newspaper editor, teacher and freelance writer from Montgomery County who writes about local history, food, art and people.