Painting in a ‘Hermited Way’

Francesco Lombardo had been trying to get his paintings noticed when, in early 2019, he got three emails on the same day from galleries that wanted to represent him. Two were from so-called “vanity” outfits that charge artists to show their work. The third was from someone real, someone opening a gallery in New York City. 

Having toiled away for years in the relative obscurity of Marshall, North Carolina, Lombardo was skeptical. Though highly accomplished—he’d been painting and studying for two decades—he lived far from New York. All the emails he’d been sending out to galleries in hopes of getting picked up had come to naught. 

And now, there was an offer he couldn’t refuse, right in his inbox.

“You work so hard in so many ways to get noticed. And the harder you work, the more likely it’s going to happen. But when it does happen, it just feels so random,” Lombardo, who goes by Frank, said, a note of anxiety at his being “discovered” coloring his voice.

Soft northern light poured into his workspace, a former classroom at Marshall High Studios. The French Broad River flowed gently around the small island that anchors the building, a century-old school converted to studios used by many of the artists who contribute to Marshall’s well-established art scene. The afternoon was quiet and chilly, contributing to the calm that seemed to pervade the halls outside Lombardo’s door. 

But inside the studio, Lombardo was feeling a bit unsettled about his new notoriety. Being picked up by Stone Sparrow NYC, the New York gallery, feels so good, he said. “But now I’m worried—am I good enough?” he said. 

By many accounts, he’s more than good enough. A Fulbright scholar who moved to Marshall 11 years ago, his work has been displayed at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. It has been featured in publications like “Art in America” and “American Art Collector.” He has been commissioned to do a lot of work, and he’s been pretty successful teaching figure drawing in person and online. 

On his website (francescolombardo.com) he says he is influenced by the “linear elegance of the High Renaissance, the serene yet compelling postures of classical sculpture, and the folds within folds of Baroque art.” Those influences are prominent in his most recent body of work, “Quantum Baroque.” It took more than a year to create some of the larger paintings, some of which are six feet wide or tall. By the time “The Annunciation of Mary,” a 67-by-55-inch oil of the Virgin Mary conceiving Jesus, was displayed at Stone Sparrow NYC, it was Lombardo’s most ambitious project.

“Frank’s concepts are as well developed as his technical skills,” said Marina Eliasi, who owns the New York gallery with her husband Udi. “He paints multiple times, multiple emotions, all at once, and he does it in a well-thought-out way. I’ve seen other artists try to do the same thing—ghosts and shadows—and they don’t do it as well. Frank takes his time. And when you don’t rush through anything, it’s very obvious in the final results,” she said.

“You don’t see many people doing his kind of work, combining realism with the Renaissance experience and surrealism,” said Brian Quaranta, a Research Triangle radiation oncologist who owns a couple of Lombardos. He first saw the work in Asheville a few years ago. “I had a hard time looking away from it. I really was taken in by the way he sees things,” he said.

Lombardo grew up in Hackettstown, a town in north New Jersey an hour west of Manhattan. A high school student full of “angst-y teenage political theory,” he often went into New York City to search for anarchist bookstores. Nothing particularly productive came out of those years, he said, except art. “Art was the first thing I did that got girls to notice me,” he said, laughing. 

He enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where the art classes were challenging and stimulating. After he graduated in 2002, he studied with the painter Odd Nerdrum in Norway, then got a one-year Fulbright grant to study in Iceland. In 2008 he moved to Asheville, a city whose size he appreciated, and it was also full of the creatives he likes being around. Looking for affordable space, he found Marshall High Studios and moved to Marshall. 

“Frank jumped right in to the community,” said Rob Pulleyn, his studio landlord. “Talk about community engagement—he’s good at that.” Lombardo ran the Marshall Handmade Market, the studios’ annual arts market, one year. This January he was organizing a masked ball to coincide with his 40th birthday.

Lombardo’s willingness to support Marshall and its people is why he’s liked and respected in town, Pulleyn said. It helps him stand out, as does the size of Marshall. “You hear all these stories about artists who go to a big city, and it’s crushing,” Pulleyn said. “It’s hard to live, and it takes away from the work you’re trying to do. In a smaller community, quality gets noticed sooner than in a big city. Where you are can be as important as what you do. They feed off each other.”

“I think it gives him space. And time,” Eliasi, the gallery owner, said. “If he lived in New York City, he would not be able to spend three years on a painting to make it perfect. He’d have to make them faster and price them competitively. The fact that he is in an area that is more affordable and quiet definitely gives him an edge.”

Moving to Marshall probably wasn’t the best financial decision for an artist trying to get national notice, Lombardo said as the light began to fade in his studio. But, he’s in a gallery in New York City now. And because he has a place in the city’s art scene, he’s working harder than ever, on paintings that are smaller than the Quantum Baroque pieces but every bit as intricate. Being cloistered—like a monk in a Shaolin monastery, he said—has allowed him to focus. And that’s been great. 

“My friends in Brooklyn had to work 10 jobs, and their studio space is like 50 square feet. Here I could paint some of these really big, difficult-to-sell paintings,” he said, cradling a cup of tea. “This was a place where I could do that sort of work, in a ‘hermited’ way.”