Painting in three dimensions

It didn’t take Tammy Evans long to fall in love with Charles

Fazzino’s art.

Evans, a Newport Coast resident who works as an attorney for

Boeing, was browsing through the Wentworth Gallery with her parents a

few weeks ago when she came upon a piece that suited her profession

perfectly.

It was a work titled “I’ll See Ya in Court,” featuring a courtroom

scene, headlines and the text of the Declaration of Independence --

all arranged in a three-dimensional mosaic.

“I’m a lawyer by trade, so there were a lot of details here that I

could identify with,” Evans said.

Evans bought the piece right away, and soon after, she purchased

another depicting the entire coast of California. Thus, when Fazzino

made his first personal appearance in Newport Beach on Saturday,

Evans and her boyfriend, businessman Rick Campbell, took both pieces

back to the gallery for autographs.

“I think it’s just the details that you can relate to,” Evans

said, surrounded by painted scenes of Paris, San Francisco, New York

and other famous locations. “It gives you a personalized connection.”

Fazzino, a 3-D-art painter whose resume includes commissions for

Warner Bros., the National Football League and Major League Baseball,

has long been one of the top-selling artists at Wentworth. On

Saturday, he stopped by the Fashion Island gallery for a one-day

signing event before heading off to Laguna Beach the next morning.

The three-hour afternoon visit drew a sparser crowd than the

gallery’s usual evening shows, but more than 50 people came by the

gallery, and around a dozen stayed to have their pictures dedicated.

It was one of many stops on Fazzino’s busy schedule. The New

York-based artist, who works in his studio during the week, travels

nearly every weekend to find new sites for his pictures. Along the

way, he’s also been exhibited at more than 600 galleries throughout

the world -- even one in the United Arab Emirates, which is scheduled

to display his work in March.

“It’s been fun,” Fazzino said. “I’m doing what I like to do, and

it’s been well received.”

Fazzino began his art career in New York in the 1970s, making

two-dimensional paintings. After graduating from the School of Visual

Arts, however, he experimented with perspective, mounting some of his

images on the surface of the canvas. When Fazzino held his first 3-D

art show in New York, he knew he had found his niche.

“Everyone who walked by said, ‘Can I have one of those?’” Fazzino

recalled. “I was just making up prices.”

When creating a new work, Fazzino first draws the scene on a flat

canvas, then he makes acetate copies of the picture and mounts some

of the details over the original -- making them stand out to the

viewer. Fazzino’s personal studio in New York, which employs more

than 50 people, then produces copies of the works to send to

galleries.

Fazzino specializes in urban scenes. Many of his works look like

pop-art maps, with a city’s famous sights bunched together and

arrayed in bright colors.

“I’ve literally seen people start tracking up the streets and

saying, ‘My apartment is right there,’” said Wentworth art consultant

Laura Clifton.