Millenium Ball

Tony Mafia didn't make it till the millennium but seemed fascinated by the turning of time. This oil painting he called millennium ball. The painting has a lot of people and some abstraction, a high bridge and a far perspective. After all it was all about futures.

The peasant couple reveling in the foreground contrasting the elegance of the two dancers in the background: this could be a painting about the clash of harsh reality and art, about expectations and dreams, about love, lust and tenderness. Tony Mafia also could have just met them on the cobblestoned streets in Antwerp in 1999, came home and painted what he felt and saw. Note the abstract paintings in the background, the meeting could have been in a gallery and the art critic took the lady home...

The sheepherder

This whimsical sheepherder stems from 1994. See the sheep peeking over the rim of the painting? I am partial to the abstractions of reds in the background, the half horizon and the tears the shepperd is crying. Why, one has to wonder.

Mixed media

Here you can see what I mean when I say that a drawing is a mixed medium. The basis here is water color, then a few lines are in oil pastels, a structured circle is in oil, there is some pen and Chinese ink and the drawing is finished in pencil. He did this drawing for a friend in Chloride Dave Hunzinger and Reta let me show it to you. A dream for Dave June 1997.

Us

This small oil (about 45 cm by 35) Tony painted in Chloride in the early nineties. The misty figure with the white hair is Mr Mafia himself and the dark haired lady, well just me. Tony regularly did whimsical portraits and this, almost abstract, is a rather gentle one.

Indians up the wall

When Tony would run out of canvasses, he would get nervous. Many of his friends have told me he would get anxious and would have to paint. Here at my our old place in Hoboken the painting grew and grew: shields, bison, receding vanishing points, braves, Thunderbirds and Black Suns. Often his signature Black Sun was enough to know it was Tony's work.

At work

In Chloride, Tony starting up a double mixed medium in the studo. And the seccond drawing a short while later. He worked very concentrated, fast. He would joke I am the fastest brush in the west... Circus, the arena of life, the studio the battleground, here his moods and feelings came to life on the canvas. Sometimes he would go back and back to the same canvas or drawing, change it, living with it.

Unfinished

If one grows old or if one doesn't, there is always unfinished business. So is this drawing of us waking up in the morning sun in Chloride. The drawing is hanging framed in the room where we did wake up: The bed, the embrace, the blues in the room and sometimes in our souls and the window with the glorious morning sun.

Growing old

The name of this drawing: They sure grow old FAST

The ink wash is titled: The old man and the past. The passing of time, growing old, seeing others age, fascinated Tony, but it also frightened him. Mafia was afraid he would be infirm, or on the other hand that he wouldn't grow old at all. He had lived hard and had heart disease, he had seen people die when Shanghai fell. His father had committed suicide and Tony valued living. So regularly the days going by and what this did to people would be portrayed.