Tony Segale Fine Art
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Tony Segale was born in a small town in the San Joaquin County of California, Lodi, in 1956. His paternal ancestors immigrated to Calaveras County, while his maternal family immigrated into Kern County. As a result, he was exposed to Northern California’s Mother Lode, the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Pacific Coast, as well as the heart of the San Joaquin Valley via Highway 99, and Southern California’s Tehachapi Mountains, Mojave Desert and Los Angeles basin. This left a lasting impression and great fondness for the Golden State of California, still discovering her back roads and historic communities.
Always a constant doodler, Tony is grateful for a couple elementary school teachers instilling his early development of speed lettering, recalling the study of repetitive form necessary to complete the task of writing one hundred times I will not talk in class in a timely manner. However, one scholarly gentlemen who taught his sixth year invited him to watch his graceful penmanship, using a calligraphy pen, nib and ink bottle. Tony was in awe.
At the age of fourteen, Tony wanted to work, and took a job in a retail meat market. This employment lasted through his cartooning for the high school newspaper years, and he liked the idea of continuing work versus school, so he stayed on. Weekly he made new 6” x 8” counter signs, always paying attention to layout while challenging his speed, yet never giving a thought to an art career.
After a dozen years, a friend suggested his talents could be better utilized making signs. Simply to test the theory, Tony grabbed a few gallons of paint, rollers and brushes and braved the weather painting a few holiday windows. That first season out, someone approached him with compliments and asked if he would make him a sign for his business, the fire was stoked.
After six years of self instruction, he left the meat trade to open his own hand lettering sign business, a full time career in commercial art. Since then, Tony has been leaving his mark in the community with his recognizable hand lettering, gold leaf windows and large murals.
Ten years into his commercial art career, his youngest daughter encouraged Tony to join the local community art organization, putting his work in their gallery. By this time, the query of art had become a passion, inspiring a burning desire to question everything through observation, study and practice. He immersed himself in calligraphy workshops in San Francisco and North Carolina calligraphy retreats. Realizing their brush skill similarities, Tony began experimenting in watercolor, eventually enrolling in numerous workshops from more than a dozen different talented instructors.
The reality that each artist is self taught, that proven fact of learning by doing, keeps the fire burning. Each venture is a cognizant function in his lifelong quest as a perpetual student of the arts.
Tony considers himself a moderne-retro painter of California, rendering the variety of rural and urban landscapes, animals and people in his graphic bravado style. He will paint on location, en plein air, or develops a sketch and paints in his studio. Tony teaches workshops in the study of brush lettering, sketching, reverse glass gold leaf and watercolor.
A few years ago, Tony and his wife, Danine, opened a gallery, combining his earlier food industry experience with his art, adding a lure of entry by featuring an ice cream counter. Believing life was meant to be fun, Segale’s Double Dip Gallery is located in Lodi, CA.
https://www.tonysegale.com/
Phone: 209-642-0009
