Tilting at Windmills with Tony Autorino

 

After a night partying in John and Peter’s, impressionist painter Tony Autorino and I walked down Main Street in New Hope kicking the parking meters.

It was a different time. All authority was hated, as today, and just about any sort of protest was expected, as long as you didn’t get caught. The parking meters were a symbol of creeping authoritarianism, government overstepping its bounds for material gain. In the 1970s there was still free street parking in New Hope in places, but Town Hall seemed intent on making anything free an antique, except of course the antiques in the many antique shops of the area.

Street after street was defaced with the parking meters, all so the local government could add a few bucks to its coffers and encourage the commercialization of town, instead of sticking to its free, artistic roots.

Thus the kicking. The local creatives didn’t like all those new parking meters.

Tony fancied himself a martial artist of sorts, so he would kick with the style and panache of a karate master. He’d leap into the air off of one foot and kick out with the other to teach the local government a lesson. I, on the other hand, would simply stay earthbound with one foot while attempting to strike a blow for freedom with a kick upwards with the other.

“Ha!” he’d shout.

I’d kick quietly.

We never broke anything. The parking meters and local commerce proved stronger than we thought. Tourism prevailed, and metered parking in New Hope persists to this day, but has become digitalized like everything else.

You can’t kick the cloud.

I’m sure Tony would try if he could. He was an independent passionate spirit, angry about something, I didn’t know what, and if he saw a digital cloud anywhere over town I know he would kick it. The advent of the ubiquitous meters was a symbol of not the creeping but the roaring materialism that’s taken over everywhere. Anyway you can make a buck …

That was not Tony’s mantra as an artist, or mine.

I guess you might say we were a couple of inspired but hapless romantics fighting back by kicking parking meters. We were a couple of modern Don Quixotes tilting at our versions of windmills.

We had about as much luck stopping the uglification of town as the real Don Quixote had of defeating the giants he saw in the windmills.

“What do you do for a living?” a young woman asked Tony one night as I was tending bar at John and Peter’s and he was keeping me company.

“I’m a painter.”

“What, you mean houses? You paint houses?”

She seemed confused.

“No, art. I make paintings.”

She seemed even more confused by that. The conversation didn’t progress much further with this child of the post-hippie era.

Born in 1937 in Montclair, New Jersey to Italian immigrants, Anthony Michael Autorino has endured as an artist who got his first start in New Hope. He was dark-haired with large brown eyes, slightly below average height, and handsome in the classically Italian manner and mane. Mostly self-taught, he said at one time that he attended the mail order Famous Artists’ School. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what truth to believe about Tony’s beginnings. I’ve heard and read various things – that his interest in painting began during his military service, that it started while he was in the Navy psychological warfare school, or that he was in the Air Force or Marines stationed in France. At one time, he was alleged to have been a jarhead guard at the American embassy in Paris. At another, I read he worked in the American embassy in the City of Light for the Air Force.

Who knows about that, or much cares? Imagination is necessary for any artist.

Whatever the true story is, the important thing is he became and painter. The one consistent fact seems to be he had his eyes widened to the glittery temptations of art while working in the French capital where painters have always thrived.

He became an American impressionist out of that experience.

“I never learned to draw, so I have to paint like that,” he said, of his hazy impressionism.

Lucky for us he never mastered the finer representational strokes of pencil on paper. From its inception, impressionism was meant to be step-back art, when the subject became clear from a distance, and even more beautiful than if viewed up close.

Tony’s landscapes were much inspired by the New Hope School of Artists – George Sotter, Fern Isabel Coppedge, Edward Redfield, William Lathrop, John Folinsbee, Walter Baum and others. He painted en plein air with a light, poetic touch and finely chosen, often pale colors, with the rhythm of nature evident in each piece. He claimed to paint everyday.

“Do you write everyday?” he asked me once.

He seemed pleased when I said I did.

Tony had a studio on South Main Street near John and Peter’s when I knew him. That’s where the parking meters suffered most. I remember a large room with lots of windows and light, and there might have been a peaked and beamed roof, although I’m blurry on that, like one of his lovely paintings. After a time, he moved his studio from New Hope to Lambertville, where it stood for twenty years before he relocated to Vermont. The impressionistic Hudson Valley School of Art also influenced him and complemented his base work in New Hope. He painted mostly in the New Hope, Lambertville and Vermont areas.

He was the only artist I knew in those days who did the nearly impossible – he supported himself with his brush.

“I wish I had the money to buy one of your paintings,” I told him.

“Maybe we can work something out,” he said. “Maybe you can cut my lawn or something.”

I should have taken the deal.

The value of his work went up during his lifetime, as I knew it would, and it still sells today in the thousands of dollars. I’m sorry now I never gassed up his lawnmower to earn what would have been a great steal for me – valuable beauty.

Tony died in Morrisville, Vermont in 2013. His work persists.

The last time I saw him hew was in New Hope for a visit. He saw me and I talked to him, but he seemed distant and couldn’t remember who I was.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know your face but don’t know your name.”

I was a little taken aback, thinking he must recall his old, rebellious, parking-meter-kicking buddy, he had to, and I felt a little hurt.

He had forgotten me. I didn’t know how that was possible, considering the bond we had opposing parking meters.

I told him my name.

“That’s right, that’s right. I remember you now. Sorry.”

He wasn’t very convincing.

Feeling scorned, I held it against him that he didn’t know who I was, thinking this unkindness was a result of his artistic success and an inflated ego.

A little while later I heard he had Alzheimer’s. Then it made sense. It was a painful thing to hear.

I understand the disease eventually killed him.

What matters is not what ended his life but what makes him live on – the painting he worked on daily with diligence and passion.

Long ago we kicked the parking meters as a protest to creeping and creepy commercialism.

He succeeded in beating it back with his art instead of his foot.