Chris D’Acunto Advertising Taught Me How to Paint

Advertising can be a piercing yell or a dusty whisper. The medium’s sole purpose is to grab your attention and arrest you. I studied advertising in college. Essentially tenure in college taught me how to use visual language to captivate my audience, grab them, stop them, and punch through with something louder and more engaging than my competition. Throughout my studies I learned the secret codes of advertising, and I apply that process to my painting. Through the concepts of advertising I learned one simple rule; the image ends with the viewer. I use this basic adage in every piece I make. I want the viewer to be visually engaged with the paintings I give them. I do not wish to cloud their minds and leave them in a highfalutin art speak trance involving exhausting history and a sense of pretension. It is for those who love and appreciate art but have always been turned off by the contemporary scene. I wish to engage my viewers and intrigue my viewers. If I can get a simple giggle or a smirk out of my viewers, then I have accomplished what I came to do. I paint what I want to see; what want other people to see. I make art for my own personal enjoyment because I absolutely love painting and could die doing it, but I also paint to let people in and tell them that art is not an exclusive VIP event. It is for everyone, MFA or not.

Chris D’Acunto earned a BA in Advertising from School of Visual Arts in 2009. He lives and Works in Brooklyn.

Anthony Browne Our greatest efforts to realize a perfect concept in plastic form will always come up short. No matter how much order and reason we try to impose on the world, there will always be disorder and irrationality. My cubes are truly irrational – built without consideration for color, line, surface, dimension, uniformity, or form. When I make a cube, the only order is: make a cube. Beyond that the process is out of control.

With friends, using whatever materials can be scavenged from my studio or the streets of Bushwick, I smash the cubes together without measuring or sawing, we just break the pieces till they fit. When it comes to deciding which material to use or how to join the sides, we don’t decide, we grab whichever is closest at hand, and that’s the right choice every time. Finishing a cube and stepping back to admire our work a friend says, “We did a pretty good job” and I say, “Yes we did, it’s very badly built.” By conventional standards these cubes are badly built, but by a new standard, they’re perfect.

Anthony Browne studies Art History at Hunter College. He lives and works in Brooklyn.