THE GALLERY AT FIREHOUSE SQUARE Sails Into Summer with Fish n’ Ships

The Gallery at Firehouse SquarE, located at 239 Bank Street in New London, is presenting a unique artist exhibit called “Fish n’ Ships” featuring the celestial maritime paintings by New Haven’s Tony Falcone and marine sculptures by New Haven’s Gar Waterman. Both artists offer two very different, yet complementary, approaches to depicting the natural world – in one aquatically oriented exhibition.  Falcone’s celestial “sailspace” paintings and Waterman’s oceanic sculptures share an enhanced, surreal approach. Guests will marvel at how Falcone’s fantasy explorations of outer/inner space using the metaphor of sailing flow beautifully throughout THE GALLERY with Waterman’s whimsical depictions of marine creatures.

“Fish n’ Ships” opens Thursday, August 1st and runs through Saturday, August 31st at THE GALLERY AT FIREHOUSE SQUARE in New London.  Guests will have an opportunity to meet and greet the artists during an opening reception on Thursday, August 1st from 5:30-8:00 p.m. All the original artwork in the show is available for purchase.  For more information, please visit www.firehousesquare.com.

Tony Falcone has been painting professionally since 1974. After serving as a New Haven firefighter for seven years, he discovered his love of mural painting and left the Fire Department to establish his studio in a vintage dairy barn located in Prospect, Connecticut. It is there, as well as throughout the United States, that he creates most of his “imaginistic” murals, canvases and portraits.

For the past 10 years, Falcone has been creating a series of oil paintings on linen depicting the history of the United States Coast Guard from WWII through “9/11,” commissioned by the U.S. Coast Guard Alumni Association and the Class of 1962 for the Coast Guard Academy in New London. The ninth painting in that series, an 11-foot canvas entitled “D-Day at Omaha Beach,” was unveiled at the Academy in a special D-Day 65th anniversary commemorative ceremony June 5, 2009.  The “9/11” painting, depicting the Coast Guard’s critical role in the evacuation of 650,000 people from Battery Park in lower Manhattan on September 11, 2001, was exhibited in 2011 at the Intrepid Museum in Manhattan in conjunction with the 10th anniversary “9/11 Retrospective.”

Other recent commissions include: murals in the Yale University Law School, a floor mural for the Yale University Peabody Museum of Natural History, a commemorative “trompe l’oeil” mural for the Alumni Center Bar at the Coast Guard Academy, and interior murals for the Floyd Little Field House at Hillhouse High School in New Haven, Connecticut. Falcone’s murals also enhance Albertus Magnus College, the Fusco Corporation, New Haven Register, and the downtown area of Old Saybrook. 

Gar Waterman’s sculptures explore the organic form.  A combination of observations of natural phenomena, sensual devotion to the tactile possibilities of material, and a model maker's tinkering sensibility inform his work.  Waterman grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with a formative year in Tahiti, where his father, pioneer underwater filmmaker Stan Waterman, documented the adventure in a National Geographic Special. Waterman’s daily contact was with the exotic flora of the Polynesian landscape and the barrier reefs of the South Pacific, with their hydrodynamic fish, rays, sharks, and corals. After college at Dartmouth, Waterman moved to Pietrasanta, Italy, where he lived for seven years and learned to carve stone. A foundation of ocean imagery experienced first hand over a lifetime of diving infuses his sculpture with marine forms, from fish, nudibranchs, and squid to the spiral perfection of shells.

For more information about the “Fish n’ Ships” exhibition and other maritime art available for viewing and purchase at THE GALLERY AT FIREHOUSE SQUARE, please visit www.firehousesquare.com.