Anthony Schepis • American (1927-)
In the Interim • Oil on Canvas 80" x 56"
Tony Schepis can remember a day three-quarters of a century in the past. His father and mother had left him alone with a small watercolor set in their cramped downtown Cleveland apartment. When they returned, the drapes were covered with blue-green paint. They should have known what he would become.
A few short years later, his mother died and, soon after, the family began to crumble. His father eventually remarried and moved to the woods and meadows of western Pennsylvania where Tony spent lonely summer days walking through the rural countryside. He was drawn to the stillness and mystery as much as the beauty.
He was a city mouse visiting the country and his favorite farm implement was a wicked ability to draw the world around him. As an eighth grader he enrolled in a correspondence cartooning course. One lesson a month for 30 months. He became so good the other kids started to notice. Every Friday the teacher in his small country school saved the last classroom hour for Tony to show the class what he was learning about art. She, too, should have known what he would become.
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By 1948 he was fresh off a 3 year stint in the Army Air Corps and ready to seriously study art. At the Cooper School of Art on Cleveland’s near east side, visiting artist Leslie Lintelman taught him to add luminosity to his work by using under painting and glazing. This was a technique employed by the great masters of Italian Renaissance art in the15th and 16th Centuries. While the art world around him exploded in an Abstract frenzy, Schepis became a man with one foot in the past and the other in the future.
At Cooper he realized there was a whole world of hyper realistic modern art that captured the mysteries of the world. Surrealism. Magic Realism. Metaphysical Art. “Something Magritte said really hit me. ‘Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” The young boy who wandered, alone, in the woods of western Pennsylvania, fascinated by the mystery of the world around him, had found his calling.
Now, 70 years later, Tony Schepis sits in his Florida studio looking back on a celebrated career as an artist and college-level teacher. He translated the mystery he felt as a child onto 2-dimensional canvases. He looks back on his brief period as an abstract painter and how the structures of abstraction informed his better-known realistic works. He points with pride to the words Dennis Dooley once wrote in Cleveland Magazine: “The best of (his paintings) shine with the silence of contemplation. Expectation poised on the edge of magic.”
Then Tony Schepis goes and works on a new painting, filling the floor with blue-green paint.
Canton Museum of Art Permanent Collection • Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Calvert Batton, 996.1
Where Abstract Principles Meet Realism
Tony Schepis spent five years exploring abstract art. When he returned to more representational works, he brought a new approach using abstract principles as a foundation. Look closely and you’ll see the underlying abstract principles: basic geometric shapes; attention to the interaction of negative and positive space; and the relationship of adjoining shapes. There is a certain geometric harmony to his work that brings order to his stunningly detailed “stillscapes.”
4 Ways to Sound Smart When Viewing at The Canton Museum of Art
1.
“He often combines landscapes and still-lifes, calling them ‘stillscapes’. Good marketing from a guy who started his career as an advertising agency illustrator.”
2.
“40 years as a college painting teacher culminated in 1999 when the Cleveland Institute of Art named him Professor Emeritus, which sounds even better than Professor Schepis.”
3.
“He had a remarkable run of Cleveland May Show success, including winning the Major Painting Award in 1988.”
4.
“You can see how closely much of his work relates to Italian Renaissance masters. He is a man with one foot in the 15th Century and one in the 20th.”
Anthony Schepis Timeline. Scroll over images to see timeline.
