When Anthony Tomaselli talks about painting in the zone, it’s like a canvas materializes in the air in front of him.

He’s in his studio desk chair at the Providence Art Club, but his weight is out on the balls of his feet, his knees are bent, and his elbow is flinging around as he mimes painting and explains: “It’s not mystical. It just is.”

Tomaselli completes about 150 paintings a year many selling for thousands of dollars.

They are scenes of Rhode Island, of Providence, of South County Beaches, a tug emerging from the fog as seen from his Conimicut home and others focus on capturing light reflecting off sky and water. Being able to find ‘the zone’ is what he credits, in large part, for his creativity. Which is funny, because according to Tomaselli, the zone is something everyone and, their little brother, has.

 “You play basketball, you’re shooting the lights out, you’re in the zone. Gardening, running a marathon, when you get in that zone, it is heaven.” 

On any given morning, the ingredients for getting in the zone are pretty simple: coffee – half-caf , some music – Isaac Gracie’s Reverie, which he is just blown away by and a lifetime of learning how to relinquish fear. Fear: that, he says, is the enemy of creativity.

There was one specific moment Tomaselli identifies as the start of that lifetime journey. It was 1979, and he was driving from California, where he had been living for the year, until he started missing home, back to Rhode Island.

He and his then-girlfriend had made a detour to see the Grand Canyon, which he described as“just immense” with a big hand wave. Then, in the evening, as they drove out of the park, he promised himself that in life, he’d never do something he didn’t want to do.

Of course, when he got home, he got a job as a waiter. “Did I want to be a waiter? No.”

Three years later, in 1982, he and his wife opened the original location of what would become T’s Restaurants. T being short for Anthony, or Tony. Soon he was working 60 hours a week in the restaurant, another 20 taking care of their young kids, all while trying to sneak in an hour or two to paint each day. This is the Anthony whose father was a bread baker, working 15 hour days – who came from a family that he says simply “knew work.”

His motivation, he says was he wanted to make money to be an artist. At the time, it was a different vision than the one he has achieved now. “Being an artist was making it in New York City. Being Keith Haring, Basquiat, Picasso.”

That dream lasted until 1990 opened the new decade, when much of the couple’s savings from T’s were erased by the savings and loans crisis. What followed were paintings of industrial pollution, war, “caricatures of the characters, the devious types, that did all the backroom dealing that exhausted the insurance for our money in the bank.”

Painting is a hard way to do it

When you need to make money, especially with a young business hit hard by a banking crisis, painting is a hard way to do it. Tomaselli says people ask him if he paints what he loves or what sells. “You know what I say? Yes.” When asked if he’s competitive with other artists, he doesn’t even wait for the question to finish before saying of course. He says the first thing he tells young artists for advice is to get a job. “You gotta live,” he says. “You need money.”

Tomaselli keeps a chart in his desk, scrawled out with sharpie on a piece of printer paper. It’s from the high school career days he goes to, as a representative of both artists and business owners. He does an exercise where he asks the kids what everyone in the world wants. Money, vacation, power – he writes all those answers down in one column. He adds the five sustenances: air, water, food, shelter, sleep. Of course, he makes everyone guess what they are before writing them down, because that’s the Socratic method of how he converses. Once they get all five, that column is headlined, fear driven. – The tangible needs – In the other column are the intangibles: family, contentment, finding the zone: headlined, love driven.

“Center the intangibles, always,” Tomaselli says. “And yet you can’t live without the tangibles. So how do you balance one column with the other?” Love driven and fear driven; Tomaselli the artist who studies Tai Chi to be able to focus down to the emotional center of his work and Tomaselli the grinder who “always wanted that next best gallery.” It’s all a careful balance.

Early years

Tomaselli’s early years as an artist were spent next to his best friend, who was also a painter. Together they were the nucleus for an eight person critique group with other artists. “It was about – don’t start telling me you like the blue in the corner. Tell me, is the point getting across.”

In those days, he says, “you never woke up wanting for anything, other than to figure out whatever you wanted to figure out.”

About that kind of group, Tomaselli says, “in school you have that. Don’t let it end.” He says this as he does many things, always with the subject being someone else who he is giving the advice to. When Tomaselli’s friend passed away, he no longer had the same joined at the hip relationship with any of his peers. Eventually, what filled that void was what Tomaselli does in just about every sentence: teaching.

Tomaselli teaches adults at the Providence Art Club. These are, as he describes it, “fifty, sixty, seventy a sometimes ninety year olds. Former CEOs, teachers, architects.” The fact that they are often not full-fledged professional artists he says keeps him honest. “Why they want to do it, that keeps me close to why I do it.”

 “They share their passion with me and its every bit as intense as mine” he says. “That camaraderie, that generates creativity.” 

Tomaselli says teaching was never scary – not even at the beginning. Which isn’t surprising if you’ve talked to him. Teaching is in the way Tomaselli leads you along in a conversation, demanding you think about each of his statements by asking questions and waiting for an answer. It’s in the way he speaks as if fascinated by everything. He uses the upper range of his voice more than just about anyone else. Most of all, it’s in how he insists, like it’s reflexive, on bringing his artistic practice down to the level of us – the people whose self expression may be just shooting hoops. “People who say they don’t have creativity, you have it,” Tomaselli insists. “Get over it. They just don’t spend the time. What do you love to do? Do it. Don’t wait until you retire, don’t wait until you find the time. Make the time.”

Anthony the businessman

Tomaselli says that Anthony the businessman is no different from Anthony the teacher, or Anthony the artist. Which is enabled by what he says is a business philosophy of “just treating people well.” The way he’s willing to equate his work as a master craftsman to someone who loves collecting stamps – just one example he gives – suggests that, though just about every business across the country up to Google describes itself as “people oriented,” he may not just be spouting hot air. 

Throughout the day-to-day, it really is all about people for Tomaselli. The door of his studio literally does not seem to shut. As in, the old wooden door is kind of misaligned on its hinges, so it either swings open or jams closed. So on warm days, it stays open, inviting students, assistants, visitors, to wander in and out of his workspace.

Tomaselli’s for going to museums? Go with people, he says, “so that you have that dialogue.”

For a young artist? “Find that crit group. You want to be a great painter, hang out with others who are painting. You want to be a great writer, hang out with others who are writing. They’re gonna push you, and tell you your work sucks, or its great. Or just be next to you, and you’ll say, wow that work is fabulous.”

He talks like this in dialogues, acting out multiple parts. He said, then I said, then she said. It’s always about human interactions.

Which is ironic because these days, the bulk of what he paints are landscapes. He has a series of paintings of Rhode Island dunes, as well as countless images of Narragansett Bay: boats at sail, boats at mooring, boats run aground; under storm light, early morning light, in fog. But, never any people.

The focus in these works is on painting light and atmosphere. For Tomaselli, a sheet of fog is exploded into a range of textures, sitting heavy around the bow of a boat or just about burned off around the sun. And never does something go without a hue. The shadow that curves along the ridge of a dune may have rich purple in the foreground, which slowly recedes into a warmer purple in the distance.

It’s a treatment that Rhode Island – often monochromatic, small, without the grandeur of say, Maine – does not usually get. You get the sense that it’s the way a fisherman, which Tomaselli is, has to note the smallest changes in the world to see the patterns in catching fish. Or the way someone who has had a lifetime of experiences on the Rhode Island coast would see it, with the land imbued with the feeling of that picnic on the dunes, or that walk with the kids through the tide pools.

Maybe he can paint landscapes the way he does because he knows people: knows how people move when they’re animated, which he always is. Knows how to watch for signs of life, and then paints that into the dunes and the boats at mooring, so that there are live characters in his work – even if they are features of the land rather than people in his life.

Tomaselli works in the oldest studio built as a studio in the entire country. His paintings sell for thousands of dollars. “There are times, of course, yeah. I feel like I’ve made it, mostly because people tell me that.” But, the guy who wakes up every morning and averages over a finished painting every two days, it’s unlikely for him to say he’s satisfied by a material standard. So, he talks about “the dichotomy between enough and not enough.” It sounds like a treatise, which maybe he recognizes, because he quickly translates it: “I don’t want to just hang around and drink coffee. It’s fricken boring!”

The new exhibition, Anthony Tomaselli: City to Sea, will be at the Dryden Gallery, in North Providence, until Aug. 26