Guess the Number of Beads on the Guitar

NCAL April Artist of the Month

The term mixed-media takes on a whole new, very beautiful meaning when one beholds 30,000 Bead Guitar, a radiant merging of two art forms by Anthony Rizzo, named April Artist of the Month for the Nature Coast Art League. This stellar, colorful sample of vivid, three-dimensional art takes the form of a decorative guitar, thus representing visual and musical art’s magic and pleasing appeal.

This marks the second time that Rizzo has been named Artist of the Month for the Nature Coast Art League, an honor that involves the display of his work throughout the month of April at the Spring Hill Branch Library, 9220 Spring Hill Drive in Spring Hill.

The mission of the Nature Coast Art League is to promote the visual arts and support artists in Hernando County and surrounding areas.

“I am very honored to be chosen as artist of the month for the second time,” he said. The base of this artwork is an actual guitar, embellished and adorned with carefully selected bejeweled pieces.

“I had a lot of beads lying around and thought it would be fun to glue them to an old guitar,” he said. “The media I used was an old, broken guitar, strings of beads, and lots of glue.”

At the peak of a 30-year career in the arts, Rizzo claimed second place in the category of 3D art in the 2023 Art in the Park NCAL show, a part of the March Art in the Park event hosted by the Hernando County Fine Arts Council. His work was exhibited in the Synthenesia show at Gallery 201 in downtown Brooksville. He is a skilled multimedia artist who enjoys all aspects of the art world, along with many hobbies through the years, such as model ship building, designing a layout for model trains, and painting scenery on the walls of the model layouts. He has been involved with NCAL for nearly a decade.

As always, in 2024, Rizzo has been keeping busy in the Tampa Bay arts community. “I participated in Art in the Park,” he said, “and I donated one of my paintings to the Clearwater free clinic for a fundraiser.”

In the future, Rizzo intends to keep making and enjoying art. “My future plans are to keep finding interesting media to work with and to create beautiful works of art,” said Rizzo.

The Nature Coast Art League will meet from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. on April 15 at People Helping People, 1396 Kass Circle, Spring Hill. Shawn Dell Joyce’s special pastel demonstration, “Capturing the Illusion of Perspective on Waves,” will come after a brief business meeting in this session. Joyce will then deliver a NCAL workshop at the same location from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on April 19, entitled Using Value as Color. The cost of the workshop is $35 for members and $45 for non-members. Cash or check only. Register at the April 15 meeting or call Diane Becker at (352) 799-0235. Visit www.shawndelljoyce.com for more information.

NCAL annual membership is $40 for a single membership or $50 for a family membership. Mail a check to Nature Coast Art League, PO Box 6284, Spring Hill, FL 34611.