Daniel's paintings range in size, from small to huge. They will involve collage, and many layers of media, from denture cream to glitter paint and sharpies. His drawings on paper are just as dense, often incorporating text reflective of Daniel's nature. Article for Raw Vision:
DISORDERED AND DRIVEN:
The Obsessive, Autobiographical Art of Daniel Belardinelli
by Tom Patterson
Daniel Belardinelli began his public emergence as an artist about fifteen years ago, and in the late 1990s his work made its debut at New York's Outsider Art Fair. Since then his paintings and drawings have continued to be featured at those annual fairs and at other venues specializing in non-academic art. Nonetheless, he occupies an interestingly problematical position in regard to the insider/outsider dichotomy that defines the field.
Resistant all his life to structured feducation, he is artistically self-taught, and his distinctive brand of stripped-down cartoon expressionism looks right at home with much other art typically categorized as outsider. Like many of his peers in that category, he has struggled with mental and psychological difficulties; on the other hand, he is a sophisticated, middle-class New Yorker whose social contacts have included a number of famous entertainers and artists. Despite difficulties he encountered in his schooling, he managed to earn university degrees in English and law, and he has maintained a career as an attorney for fifteen years. His artistic reputation has been somewhat overshadowed by publicity surrounding his close connection to a victim of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. (Originally booked to fly from Newark to San Francisco that day in the company of his uncle, William Cashman--one of the passengers who died on hijacked United Airlines flight 93 when it crashed in rural Pennsylvania--Belardinelli canceled his plans before departure.)
Like many trained and untrained artists, Belardinelli (b. 1961) has been making art since he was a child. His early art pursuits were encouraged by his family and kept him occupied during the many after-school hours he spent in the two restaurants his father's family owned in Midtown Manhattan. These establishments, Savoya and Savoya II, were frequented by popular entertainers including Groucho Marx, Tony Bennett, and Soupy Sales, as well as successful horse-racing jockeys and the occasional Mafia kingpin. Meeting such people was routine for the young Belardinelli, who regularly eavesdropped on the animated conversations in the Savoya's bar. He typically augmented his quick sketches of the resident cast of colorful characters with marginal notes containing snippets of their lively banter. These drawings were prototypes for the work he continues to produce as an adult--images of grimacing, bug-eyed stick figures and sparely rendered objects set off against neutral grounds and accompanied by brief textual passages.
In his pre-college years, Belardinelli routinely received low marks for his lackluster classwork and his unruly behavior in several private schools he attended. He participated enthusiastically in sports activities, and he enjoyed reading and making art, but only on his own terms. A self-described misfit, he now attributes his academic failures to the psychological problems for which he began to seek treatment in his thirties. Specialists initially diagnosed him with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), for which he was medicated for several years, but a more recent diagnosis defines his condition as a personality disorder that medications are unable to cure. In the topsy-turvy, funhouse-mirror domain of outsider art, such psycho-clinical diagnoses amount to credentialed validation, rather like a "mainstream" artist's MFA degree.
Belardinelli was a teenager in the mid-1970s, when his restaurateur father introduced him to the demimonde of New York night life, often bringing him along for outings at the city's most exclusive discos. He remembers Studio 54, the most famous such establishment, as particularly important to his development because "it was where I was exposed to creativity and eccentricity." There he met cultural luminaries including writer Truman Capote, Gerome Ragni (co-writer of the Broadway musical Hair), fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez, and photographer Christopher Makos, then working for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. Belardinelli met Warhol during visits to Makos' studio, and on one occasion, in 1981, Warhol made some Poloraid photos of Belardinelli in the nude. Belardinelli also had occasions to meet and talk with iconic contemporary artists Larry Rivers and Julian Schnabel, and was a passing acquaintance of Jean Michel Basquiat not long before the latter's meteoric ascent to artistic fame and subsequent tragic self-destruction.
After graduating from high school at nineteen, Belardinelli enrolled in the first of four colleges and universities he attended in the northeastern United States over six years before he finally earned an undergraduate degree in English from the University of Massachusetts. At a loss over what to do with his life, he eventually entered law school at the City University of New York, where he earned his law degree in 1992. He subsequently joined a small law firm in Morris County, New Jersey, where he lives with his wife of ten years, Marianne McGlone-Belardinelli, a divorce attorney.
Belardinelli's relationship to the self-taught/outsider field is complicated by this academic and professional background, as well as by his connections with art-world celebrities. His work has been compared with Basquiat's, although he denies that Basquiat influenced him. In any case, resemblances between their work are generally superficial--a reductive figural-expressionist style, a habit of incorporating texts into their art, and a few details such as the frequent appearance of characters wearing crudely stylized crowns and baring prominent teeth.
Belardinelli's drawings and paintings always allude to some form of narrative, and a number of them feature a recurring cast of characters including skeletons, a halo-bedecked angel, a boxer, and an individual known as the Road King. He acknowledges that some of these characters represent aspects of himself. Occasionally a drawing depicts an ordinary object juxtaposed with a brief but charged line of text--a playground swing with the words "MOOD SWING," for example, or the receiving end of a gun barrel with the words "PLEASE DON'T SHOOT ME." Sometimes he references historical events, as in a drawing with the inscription "SAMPLE OF THE REVISED TRAMPLING," in which a naked, dark-skinned figure with an arrow implanted in his torso lies prone beneath the hooves of a bucking horse ridden by a maniacal-looking cowboy. As those examples suggest, his art usually carries an undercurrent of sardonic, socially critical humor, and much of it conjures a mood of existential angst. In the latter respects his work resonates with much current "insider" art.
Belardinelli's most sustained serial effort as an artist has consisted of the text-augmented drawings he has made on a daily basis in a collection of journals he has kept since the 1980s, along with related collages and ancillary notebooks. This material--some of which I perused during a recent visit to his small, tidy studio in SoHo--yields ample evidence of his creativity's obsessive character. His sparely expressive artistic style invariably conveys a sense of communicative urgency. Among their other idiosyncracies, the journal drawings often incorporate passages painted with nail polish. Appropriate to their format, these images are often overtly autobiographical, populated by his family members and not infrequently preoccupied with his own physical and psychological problems.
In a recent e-mail exchange Belardinelli discussed the varied approaches he takes in his works, depending on their format: "the paintings/drawings that appear in the journals usually start with the text and then the image is made afterward. this is not the case with the larger works. my larger works are much more spontaneous and free flowing..... i like to paint with my hands and occasionally use nails or other sharp tipped objects to scratch into the paint in order to make other, less dominant and noticeable images in my paintings. i also like to collage photographs from magazines and newspapers into the paintings, as well as older drawings.....with [these] larger works, it's an all out battle. i prefer working on the larger pieces because i do not like to feel confined. i also physically get into a painting when i work and use both my hands to paint."
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