Boards

Sometimes Tony would paint on boards when he wouldn't have any canvas or good paper. This oil painting could well be a portrait. I don't have a date yet I am pretty sure it stems from the seventies and also that is was painted in Los Angeles

Erotica

Well here is Pan and a nymph in action. As far as I can tell it is an oil from the sixties. Figurative but with hidden figures and areas of abstractions. Enjoy.

Painters at play

If you look well at this painting you'll see an assortment of painters in the guise of harlequins and magi. They hold the pallet, and have each a brush tipped with a different color. They paint the spring with gentle color. I think often Tony would have liked to repaint a better, prettier world than the one he saw. Although on other days he was in the best of all possibles worlds. That is dichotomy in a fertile mind.

Music and drawings

Chuck Johnson said:
After fifty years, I decided to look for Tony Mafia, and it appears as if he is deceased.
I used to talk to Tony from time to time in a coffee shop in New York. The two of us, along with a small group of other enthusiasts, used to rendezvous there to listen to Augustin de Mello, a self taught Flamenco guitarist. Augustin made an LP recording not long after that time, and I have an autographed copy of the recording. Augustin never gained much fame as a guitarist, but he did gain some notoriety as the father of the supposed genius, Adragon De Mello, who was attending college at age ten. As I recall, Morley Safer interviewed Adragon for a segment of CBS’s 60 Minutes back in the late 1980’s.
One of the members of our group was the starving Cuban artist, Arnaldo Ravelo Avellaneda who was a friend and lover of another Cuban artist, Angel Acosta Leon, who was still in Cuba at that time, before Castro’s revolution, while Batista was still President of Cuba.
In the fall of 1959, in Cafe Roue in New York City's Greenwich Village, I had a conversation with Tony about art. I was carrying a 9” x 12” pad of drawing paper, some chalks, and a marker pen and trying to sketch a girl who sat a few tables away from us. My efforts were clumsy and juvenile, and Tony said that I was trying to be too precise. He asked to borrow the pad and chalks and, in a matter of minutes, proceeded to draw the girl in a Picassoesque style that amazed me.
He then tossed off another drawing. This one was of a nude standing with an observer looking away from her, and quickly thereafter sketched a seated nude. After that, since we were listening to Spanish Flamenco music, he sketched a toreador standing in the traditional killing pose, with his sword drawn. A few minutes later, in the most detailed of his drawings that night, he sketched what appears to be a Spanish “Don.”
I don’t remember what Tony’s employment was at the time, but it was not as an artist.
He drew these five sketches in less than thirty minutes, and he made them so quickly and professionally that I asked him to sign them. I also suggested that he should become a professional artist.
Tony pooh-poohed the idea, and said that he wasn’t interested.
I had been in New York only to take courses at The New School, and when the semester was finished I left New York and returned to George Washington University.
I lost track of Tony after that, but I kept his drawings with me through many moves and corporate transfers, Puerto Rico, back to Washington, then Dallas, Chicago, and Kansas City.
I re-discovered the drawings while going through memorabilia after my wife died.
I don’t have photographs of these drawings, but, if anyone is interested in seeing them, I will arrange to have photos taken.
May 15, 2009 4:27 AM

With thanks to Chuck, Arlette's picture of Tony and 'reflexivity.com'

The pond

THE POND


Morning in Hoboken. Light meets me again, the light
of long languid days at the pond near Lawrence Hall.
Oh, eight again in the orphanage of Chicago!
(My Cherokee daddy took a deadly drink of acid,
run-down by the taunting sneers about his lineage.)

All the time of the world. I and the boys never plan,
it all happens to us of itself, like one day
just being dropped here of itself. It is a tacit covenant:
misery we drown together in this secret pond
in the middle of the woods. All our senses sharp.

All gradations of green circle the glade where clouds
touch water, pink veils brought in by the wind.
I hear yesteryear’s sounds: the song of redwing and hummingbird
blending with our high voices of boys and the diving,
the breaking and splashing of water. We looking for water turtles.

Briefly eight again in the orphanage, but the screeching
of the seagulls brings me back. Winter in Hoboken.
Fog collars me now. Singularly touches me,
mutes colors and sounds. People hurry by, numbed and lost
deep in themselves. It is the restraint that strikes me here:

of the light hardly showing color, of the pigeon on the branch in the mist,
of nothing still stirring, of sound we gave a name but continues
to stutter strangely in the ears and, if at last the sun breaks through,
the shifting of shadow and light. It is my heart that is touched here.
Years and years beyond words.

Rose Vandewalle wrote this poem for the Demer Publication 'Black Sun' which you can order at Lulu. It is close to Tony's sentiments mixed with her own sensitivity. She knew Tony, owns work by him, has known the painting in my living room for a long time.

Double portrait ten years laters

TOOLS OF SOLACE


Pen pallet pencil
with tools life is lived
and then the red
touched with the smallest
brush
minutes till sudden death

for the colors
gray for the polder sky
for doves up high titanium white
viridian green for trees and woods
alizarin, crimson, rose madder
for lust, blush, desire, burning fire
Naples’ yellow
for a sweater painted twice
and blue
for the hue of soul
Sienna, umber, burned earth
for desert and for sand

and for
the smell of paint &
turpentine
I was ablaze

so it is that
with scorched hand
I write -

My poem from ' Black Sun': Gedichten voor Tony Mafia / Poems for Tony Mafia (boek): 10 poets whom I thank!

Here you can read and order:

The painting obviously is a double portrait, painted not too long before May 10, 1999. It speaks of the importance of art and caring. Tony you are remembered and missed. Lets celebrate life!

Horse dance

THE GENESIS OF CREATION
(The tearful eye of God)


It is always the power of the beast excelling human beings
and present in images we see with closed eyes
(sometimes blind to history). In a different place.
In the Camargue (wild horses). In dreams saved in scraps
in the head, the mind, where all eventually disappears.
But this horse that has broken free of the herd
I saw again in a man, a long time ago. He stood with his feather
headdress on a stage in Battery Park swaying his arms
screaming at 200,000 people - in the background
above him the Twin Towers emerging
as temporary gods - the eye of an invisible hurricane:
First they took our buffaloes
then our land
and what’s still left for us in territory
they build nuclear power plants!
The red stallion is the painter’s brush:
he who creates knows that this arises from what is destroyed,
he who writes knows that words have to perish
if they are to have new life.
They are like the flowers on giant cactuses, briefly blooming only.
I see a part of a painting and I see a part of what
is expressed: all Guernicas and Chattanoogas never passed.

Poem by Hannie Rouweler publisher of Black Sun. It wasn't about these horses she wrote the poem but this painting in oil hasn't been posted yet. It has been shown in Hoboken in the townhal..

Tony Dean Mafia / Black Sun

TONY DEAN MAFIA
after a picture, for Annmarie Sauer

Subdued, as only death can make you,
still and in thought
so I see Tony sitting
in the sands of a white and far off past,
I who have not known him but
- ten years after his breath -
hear him talk, play music,
see him paint with colors of earth and blood
and a brush in which his heart still beats.

Tony, marked by the exhaust fumes of Chicago
and chained to the shots ringing in his name,
a James Dean with Cherokee in his veins:
the cowboy boots reminding me of
those of J.J. Jones, the Navajo who
in Monument Valley among timeless cathedrals
of red rock and whiffs of Marlboro smoke
forever passed on to me the sadness of his eyes.
Look: the galloping mummy of John Wayne !

I kneel for you Tony, and ask
- if only for a second -
to look into my eyes,
the gaze away from the white sand.
And to talk about Indians
and their trail of tears.

This poem by Willie Verhegghe is in fact made to the photograph of Tony you see when opening the blog.I added another picture, looking at the artisan guitar builder at Montellano, near Seville in Spain, who made 'The Crying Madonna' and the classical dark wooded guitar. He still looks away, but here he looks at something he enjoys. The poem is from the 'Black Sun', a publication, which you can order at Lulu.