The Globe & Mail // the dark side of a flower street artist
WEST QUEEN WEST'S own Angell Gallery
Presents
New York based artist, Michael De Feo's, newest work.
The Globe & Mail describes his work ...
"..the small but forceful exhibition turns out to be a gathering of only five self-portraits - glowering, mask-like things, formidable in their almost Giacometti-like anguish. The one reproduced here looks haunted and primitive, like the wicker men, the effigies the ancient Gauls used to burn in human sacrifices, according to Julius Caesar.
Despite the unsettling self-portraits, De Feo turns out to be not an angry, disaffiliated street artist but a self-confessed "wearer of many hats" and an amiable high-school art teacher (in Fairfield County, Conn.), loving father to his five-year-old daughter, Marianna, and the author of a well-received children's book, Alphabet City: Out on the Streets (Gingko Press). But, as he explains to me on the phone from New York, the corrosive self-portraits were begun three years ago during a dark time when he and his wife were splitting up..."
