We were lucky to catch up with Donald Gialanella recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Donald thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Was there an experience or lesson you learned at a previous job that’s benefited your career afterwards?

After a decade-long career as an Emmy winning Network TV graphics producer in New York City, I made the decision to quit my job and pursue a life I was passionate about – being a sculptor.

Leaving a prestigious job wasn’t easy, I had a family to support and going without a steady paycheck was risky. But, I felt I had gone as far as I could at abc, so made the move and never looked back.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

I was fortunate to be able to attand The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art on a full tuition scholarship. As a student my artistic horizons were broadened by the cultural avant garde of New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1970’s.

Cooper Union is a place young artists aspire to attend. Downtown in the Bowery, the fabled campus is smack dab in the middle of the Manhattan neighborhood where artistic revolutionaries like William S. Burroughs, Mark Rothko and Cy Twombly lived and worked. My teachers at The Cooper Union included Louise Bourgeois, Jim Dine, Hans Haacke, Kenneth Snelson, Vito Acconci and Milton Glaser.

The large steel sculptures I was creating during that developmental period tell a story of derived artistic ideas reminiscent of Mark Di Suvero, Ronald Bladen and the abstract expressionist sculptors who adopted heavy equipment as working tools for the first time. Amid the radical tenets of Hans Haacke’s anti-aesthetic philosophy and Vito Acconci’s conceptual performance art, I was exposed to the forces of stylistic and rhetorical innovation.

As a young artist I found an inner peace in this supercharged academic environment and struggled with conflicting aesthetics and with finding my own voice among this formidable pantheon of creators. I wanted, passionately to express myself in an authentic way.

I formed a friendship with Bourgeois, which led to becoming her assistant after graduation. During those two years, working out of her brownstone home/studio in Chelsea, I learned first-hand what it was like to live the life of an artist while helping her mount a one-woman show at The Museum of Modern Art. This mentor-ship with Louise was the most formative experience of my young career.

After a short stint in Southern California working as a newspaper illustrator for the Blade-Tribune in Oceanside, I returned once more to New York and found a home at the ABC television graphics department. I thrived on the challenge of creating images everyday for World News Tonight and was soon second in command of the department supplying graphics for ABC news, sports and entertainment shows produced in New York. It was a game with high stake deadlines, fierce departmental rivalries and cutthroat corporate politics. I loved it, but I yearned to be express my ideas as an artist. After ten years at abc I left to become independent.

During this transitional period I traveled abroad with my wife and two young sons – a third son was born in Turkey. We spent several years living on campus while I taught art at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. I found a freelance job that involved jetting to Istanbul on the weekends to design movie sets. Tea in small glasses, exotic cuisine, Ottoman culture and a thousand years of history – a brave new world where I had the opportunity to rediscover myself.

On a film set in the Sultanahmet district of Istanbul, the avant-garde Turkish film director Sinan Cetin, pressed me to mount a one-man show. I followed that advice and it changed the course of my life. “The painting exhibit made me realize what I create has meaning to others,” I wrote in my journal. “It is the validation I need to break free.”

After the show we left Turkey and returned to the states. Now, at the age of thirty-nine, I found my vocation in sculpture. I made figurative work at my first studio in Cooperstown, New York, and raised a family of three boys in the rural countryside.

Twelve years later, I moved west and began working in Taos, New Mexico, the legendary high-desert town of 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.

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. Larry had a coterie of counter-culture artist friends in Taos that included Dennis Hopper, Ken Price, Dean Stockwell and Ronald Davis. When Gialanella 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 to Los Angeles where I began working on a series of assemblage orbs made from discarded stainless steel objects – pots, pans, hubcaps and pet bowls.

I first developed this curious pack-rat technique of joining dissimilar objects together in Taos, but in LA I began using it to make non-objective structures. I called 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 over-consumption, planned obsolescence, hoarding and the production of massive amounts of garbage, my midden work offered a new perspective on the pervasive cycle of production, consumption, and destruction.

I spent half of 2015 as artist-in-residence in Kingman, Arizona where I created a twelve foot tall steel anthropomorphic running hare sculpture installed on historic Route 66 that has since become an iconic symbol for the town. Instead of returning to Los Angeles, I headed east to Florida to visit relatives and found solace in the tropical warmth and family ties. After setting up a studio in St. Petersburg, I began my most prodigious outpouring of work to date with over twenty pieces in public collections from coast to coast and several major commissions in production.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

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 scary 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.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I am interested in projects that focus on environmental themes, recycling awareness, animal welfare, and that also encourage viewer interaction. These issues appeal to my life-long love of nature and my reverence for the animal kingdom.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.donsculpture.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/donaldgialanella/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livesteel/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donald-gialanella-9649a630/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/livesteelman
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCANGB-RlV7obWJAEKDAqeJg

Image Credits
Personal photo by Beth Reynolds