Georgia Mountain Laurel

With Anthony Abreu it's all in the detail.

Long before he was selling his work in the mountains of Northeast Georgia, artist Anthony Abreu was fly finishing streams in the area he now calls home. The knack of casting the line, the patience and attention to minutia that it takes to fish for trout is not unlike those traits necessary to produce paintings with the detail found in Anthony Abreu’s canvases.
In his case, a picture truly is worth at least one thousand words; each of them unique and loudly expressive.
The artist in black, on the day of this interview, is anything but black in his paintings that exude light and color and texture and shadow – all in the proper proportion and balance to ensure that there is life and light even in darkness.
Except for his brief flirtation at a very early age with learning to play the guitar – a skill he also later mastered -- Anthony has always been about art. He was painting when he was six, won his first competition when he was 16 and, as an adult, was creating conceptual art for such well-known names as Disney and Firestone. His natural proclivity for the painted canvas was structured by the Ringling School of Art in Sarasota, FL. Further validation and encouragement came from no less than the late, renowned Americana artist Norman Rockwell who counseled Anthony “to never give up his art, and to always continue painting.”
That he heeded those words of encouragement from one of the American “Masters” can be found in the oil paintings and watercolors that are now held in private and corporate collections throughout the Southeast and as far west as New Mexico.
Anthony believes that each painting should tell a story, should encourage interaction between the viewer and the canvas in such a way that the story behind the painting is also revealed.
In his publicity material, he explains that each piece begins in his imagination and for weeks, maybe longer, he lives in each story he wants to convey on canvas. “I’ve always tried to inject expression into my paintings so they will reach people’s hearts and speak directly to them.”