About Tony Alderman

My passion for art over the last fifteen years has been directed by two deeply intertwined love affairs:  the first is my love for the North Carolina coast and all the things related to it, and my second love is how the passage of time effects community as well as everything we see. 

 

As artists, our visual field is the canvas. The North Carolina coast with its natural beauty and historic communities, old fishing villages, and people, offer up a visual feast to this artist.  Our coast’s beautiful salt marshes and sunsets, its deserted train stations and abandoned fishing vessels, its rusting water towers, old churches and on rare occasions the elderly, life battered and unique individuals, have been inexplicably part of my artistic journey.

 

I believe that there is a continuity in the movement of time. For me, all joy and life begin and end and begin again in the continuity of natural life, in the sky, the clouds and water. I feel peace, even in the midst of loss and decay. As I gaze out at a sunrise coming over the salt marshes of Lockwood Folly River or over Pamlico Sound, I am filled with a powerful sense of peace. It is my hope that my paintings will convey that same sense of peace from these scenes of the natural and aging beauty of the North Carolina Coast.

 

As I have spent the last decade painting these images of decaying old Coastal towns. It is serenity and tranquility that I feel, even amid loss and decay. The people I have met have a proud history.  They are fighting to not lose their way of life and their decades long connection to the sea.  Their lives and memories of the many people before them are reflected in the objects and scenes of my work.  Shrimp boats, most built here in North Carolina, the old and soon to be abandoned nets, the railways, fish houses, piers, and reed marshes are not the focus but are a reflection, a moment in time, that captures the past, the present and even the inevitable future that ages and changes us all.

 

It is my hope and my desire that my paintings will convey to you that same sense of peace I feel from these scenes of the beauty and aging beauty of the North Carolina Coast.

 Tony Alderman

 

 

After completing his degree in religious studies 1983, Tony returned to school at University Mobile on a full scholarship where he obtained a bachelor’s degree in fine art.

He received the Art Area award in 1985 as well as the Centennial Award from the Blount Foundation in Alabama

Tony relocated to Durham North Carolina 1985.

There Tony was commissioned by the engineering department at Duke University to render a portrait of the Hudson building in both pin and ink and in watercolor. Prints were then used as awards for students.

From 1989 until 2008 Tony was known for his imaginative and distinctive murals. Tony painted commissioned works from upstate New York to Miami Florida including a mural for the home of the late Frank Keenan at landfall North Carolina. During the introduction of magnet schools in North Carolina Tony was engaged to create a number of multi-wall murals in the schools

Since 2008 Tony’s primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. His focus being on nautical, coastal paintings as well as historical rural city life. He developed an extraordinary intimacy with the land and sea and strove for a spiritual understanding based on history and unspoken emotion.

Tony’s work can be found in many corporate and private collections.