Fred Tomaselli, “Second Nature”
by Liz Goldner
Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California
Exhibition continues through February 2, 2025
October 19, 2024
Fred Tomaselli discussing his inspirations and artistic methods. All photos of images are courtesy of Jeff Rovner Photography.
Psychedelic art, the creation of oft-stoned artists of the 1960s and 70s, went out of fashion decades ago. Fred Tomaselli, a native of Santa Monica now living in Brooklyn, never abandoned the genre. His artwork, however, departs from traditional psychedelia by not relying on serpentine-style drawing with kaleidoscopic coloration, the kind that often graced the covers of rock LPs.
Tomaselli’s brightly colored paintings of birds, plant life and animals, along with abstract-expressionist inspired work, spring in part from his vivid imagination. They also include elements from his vast collections of pressed leaves, flowers, botanical drawings, insects, “New York Times” headlines, and a variety of drugs, legal and illegal, including LSD tabs. Other interests influencing his work are birding, gardening, and fly-fishing. The artist seamlessly weaves these elements, themes, and life experiences together, along with paint, photos and resin, to create wildly attractive images, always adhering to the formal parameters of line, shape, color, and space.
Fred Tomaselli, “Irwin’s Garden,” 2013, acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel.
Raised in Santa Ana, California, Tomaselli spent many days and evenings at nearby Disneyland while growing up, developing a fascination for how the artificial world is perceived as reality. He fills his mature art with insights that grew out of this exposure. His Disneyland perspective was so profound that when he first saw running water in a field, he thought it must have gotten there through plumbing. As a surfer, he worked on surfboards, coating them with resin, developing skills that carried over to his paintings. And, of course, his ingestion of a variety of psychedelic drugs as a teenager carried him to the surreal worlds that populated his early artworks.
Fred Tomaselli, “After June 2, 2017,” 2018, acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel.
Tomaselli no longer takes psychedelics, but he includes pharmaceuticals in his collaged paintings in order, he explains, to enable us to experience psychedelia by looking at his work rather than through our bloodstream. He explains, “It is my ultimate aim to seduce and transport the viewer into the space of these pictures while simultaneously revealing the mechanics of that seduction.” Indeed, to look at a roomful of the artist’s beautifully wrought, surrealism-influenced mixed-media paintings is to be transported to Tomaselli’s phantasmagorical world where planetary chaos and corruption are transformed into beauty. And yes, an exhibition of his work can be mind-blowing — in a good way.
Fred Tomaselli, “Untitled,” 2020, acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel.
Tomaselli is aesthetically indebted to Spanish surrealist Joan Miró (1893-1983), explaining, “He created cosmic, abstract art while Europe was in chaos, but his work didn’t depict the calamity of the world. Instead, he emphasized a cosmic order and the enduring importance of art to human civilization. I felt a similar sentiment and took it as an inspiration.” Take his “Irwin’s Garden” (2013), a wild, swirling profusion of brightly colored flowers and deeper green leaves, many from natural specimens that he collects, against a blue background. The effect of this classically constructed piece is of a vibrant and healthy natural world, consistent with his observation about Miró.
Fred Tomaselli, “Honeycreeper,” 2022, acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel.
“Saturday, January 17, 2015” (2016) is one of several collages based on scans from New York Times front pages. The artist retains the original headline, which reads, “2014 Breaks Heat Record, Challenging Global Warming Skeptics.” Then he paints a colorful, heat-infused swirling design, signifying global warming, over the original Times image. “After June 2, 2017” (2018), composed of acrylic, photo-collage and leaves, is a giant multi-faceted, multi-colored starburst, with a few human hands reaching out from within. A closer look reveals a New York Times logo and a headline announcing, “Trump Abandoning Global Climate Action.” This, “Saturday, January 17, 2015,” and other works manifest one of the artist’s ongoing obsessions.
Fred Tomaselli, “Untitled,” 2020, acrylic, photo collage, leaves and resin on wood panel.
“Untitled” (2020) is an amalgam of pinwheels floating in a sea of blue, with several eyes peering out at us, as strips of newsprint reference a variety of calamitous issues: sexism, wildfires, and abuse in religious orders. While the overall look of the piece is colorful and decorative, the newsprint strips draw us into the artist’s feelings about living on a planet that has been going out of kilter. “Honeycreeper” (2022), a mixed-media work of acrylic paint, photo-collage and leaves, also builds its composition on numerous adjacent pinwheels. The image is a psychedelically styled, long-beaked bird with a magnificently intricate design covering its body. The black background adds a sense of spatial ambiguity that heightens the work’s feeling of mystery.
Tomaselli embraces the equation that an artist is a sorcerer or alchemist, freely working in a variety of styles that draw on his vast collection of objects and media. Out of all of these variables, he consistently conjures results that are inspired and unified by his life experiences and vivid imagination. Fortified by his foundation of classic artistic training, he seduces us, as he says, not only into acknowledging that the livability of our planet is in peril, but into recognizing that underneath the chaos, there is deep beauty worth highlighting.
