Today we’d like to introduce you to Donald Gialanella.
Hi Donald, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself
My name is Donald Gialanella. I left a decade-long career as an Emmy-winning Network TV graphics producer in 1991 to pursue a life I was passionate about – being a sculptor. I live in St. Petersburg; Florida and I work in permanent materials – stainless steel and corten steel.
I began working with metal in 1975 while earning a BFA at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in NYC. My teachers read like a Who’s Who of contemporary art. I studied with Hans Haacke and Vito Acconci, Kenneth Snelson, Jim Dine, and Louise Bourgeois.
But the greatest impact on my career was made by Louise Bourgeois, who asked me to become her assistant after graduation. She showed me what it was like to live the life of an artist.
For the past twenty-six years I have been creating metal and assemblage sculptures motivated by a desire to communicate my ideas to a wider audience. For the past 7 years my practice has shifted almost exclusively to public sculpture. I relocated my studio from New York to Taos, NM in 2009, then to Reseda, CA, and finally to St Pete, FL. My subjects range from life-size animal and human figures to birds, fish, and insects, as well as abstract assemblage orbs made from an organized cacophony of disparate objects.
Some of these assemblage sculptures contain a variety of welded metal objects, others are made of toys – still, others are a combination of household objects and electronics. I want the sculptures to appear as if some cosmic magnet has pulled hundreds of objects together to create a perfect sculptural form.
In late 2015 my right hand began shaking. After seeing three different neurologists and a full battery of tests and scans, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Just as I was reaching the point in my career where my work was gaining momentum, I was given this devastating prognosis.
Coming to grips with the disease was a stressful and painful experience. I was in denial, struggling to grasp the gravity of it. Feeling worse and worse, I was getting more depressed with each passing day and finally realized that I had to accept the reality of my condition and keep working. I decided that a Parkinson’s diagnosis is not the end of the road. I started to make lifestyle changes and dedicated myself to keep moving and exercising in hopes of slowing the progression of the disease.
Taking inspiration from artists who continued to work despite their physical limitations, most notably Mark Di Suvero and Chuck Close, I got back into the studio. I found I could still work and weld, despite the tremor. Although it is now much harder to do simple tasks, with extra effort and maintaining a positive attitude I can still work. When people see me struggle to create sculpture in spite of my disability, I hope it can be an inspiration to overcome obstacles in their lives.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I’ve experienced the usual ups and downs of navigating the journey to becoming an artist. Big highs and terrible lows, but I wouldn’t change a thing, except one – being afflicted with Parkinson’s.
It’s getting harder—very hard actually—to work with my Parkinson’s tremor, as a result, I’ve been relying on assistants and helpers at the studio, and it’s been a great thing. Sculptors typically want to do everything themselves, at least I did. The fact that a large part of my functionality was taken away has ironically expanded my capabilities because now I’m delegating specific tasks to others. The result has been increased productivity and the opportunity to pass on my knowledge to a new generation of upcoming artists. I feel like I found a way to make lemonade out of a very big lemon.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar, what can you tell them about what you do?
After nearly a decade at the network, I left ABC in 1992 and moved to Upstate New York where I made primarily simple steel figurative work in my first studio located in Cooperstown while raising a family of three boys in the rural upstate countryside.
Twelve years later I moved west and began working in Taos, New Mexico, the legendary high-desert town renowned for artists like Agnes Martin, Georgia O’keeffe, and D.H. Lawrence. My Taos studio was a shack with no running water or insulation. It had a plywood roof that leaked like a sieve during the spring snowmelt. But it had a splendid view of Taos Mountain and intrepid clients found adventure in the pilgrimage to see my work.
During that time, I was exposed to Native American philosophy that would influence my view towards the stewardship of nature. Ecological concerns had always been a part of my motivation to create images of animals, but I was finding a way to express a deeper environmental message as I developed solutions to the practical problems of building large metal sculptures.
In Taos I met Larry Bell, who had studios in both Taos and Venice Beach, California. In his Taos workshop Bell showed me how he created metallic finishes on glass and paper using a hi-tech process called thin film deposition. In addition to being one of the faces on the Beatles Sergeant Peppers album cover, Larry had a coterie of counter-culture artist friends in Taos that included Dennis Hopper, Ken Price, Dean Stockwell, and Ronald Davis. When I started visiting Larry at his studio in Venice Beach, I began to see the possibilities of living and working in Southern California. In 2010, I left Taos and moved my entire studio to Los Angeles.
Exposed to the glitzy LA art scene, I went into the studio and destroyed some of my early works, seeing them as too conservative. I began to gravitate toward abstraction. I started work on a series of assemblage orbs made from discarded stainless steel objects including pots, pans, hubcaps, and pet bowls. I first developed this curious packrat technique of joining dissimilar objects together in Taos, but in LA I began using it to make non-objective structures. I call these conglomerations of objects, “midden” sculptures. The term midden refers to a dump for domestic waste which may consist of animal bone, botanical material, vermin, shells, shards, and other artifacts and ecofacts associated with past human occupation.
In a consumer culture that promotes materialistic excess evidenced by conspicuous overconsumption, planned obsolescence, hoarding, and the production of massive amounts of garbage, I attempted to show through these midden sculptures a new perspective on the pervasive cycle of production, consumption, and ultimately, destruction.
In a quest to broaden my studio experience I accepted a six-month-long artist-in-residence program in Kingman, Arizona. It offered me a taste of living and working in a new part of the country. This change of venue reinvigorated my working routine and soon after leaving Kingman, I decided to pull up stakes in California and move to St Petersburg in late 2015.
Let’s talk about our city – what do you love? What do you not love?
There are so many good things about St Pete it’s hard to say what I like best, but if I had to choose one thing it would be the art scene. There’s an amazing variety of opportunities for artists here owing to the many galleries, museums, and the Warehouse Arts District, which comprises a number of glass hot shops and artist’s studios. Several non-profit Arts advocacy organizations are also locally based, like Creative Pinellas, and The St Pete Arts Alliance, that give out generous art grants on a yearly basis. We have incredible world-class museums including, The Dali Museum, The Chihuly Collection, The Morean Center, The Imagine Museum, The James Museum of Western & Wildlife Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, and Great Explorations Museum, to name just a few.
Contact Info:
- Email: livesteel@gmail.com
- Website: http://www.donsculpture.com/
- Instagram: donaldgialanella
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livesteel/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCANGB-RlV7obWJAEKDAqeJg
Image Credits
Donald Gialanella
Alex Arostegui
Jeff Torode
Courtesy Marquis
Latimer + Halback
