Frequently, when David Gesualdi starts a marble sculpture, he’s not sure what the finished product will look like.

“I just start making forms in the stone, and then I’ll look at it, and I’ll look at it, and I’ll work it a little bit more and ideas start to come,” he says.

As Gesualdi chisels away at the stone, recognizable images begin to take shape. “I’ll see a face, I’ll see a figure, I’ll see something, I’ll see some meaning in it, and then I just keep working from that perspective.”

While many artists create a model in clay and then recreate that model in stone, Gesualdi wants to keep the creativity alive while his hands are working the stone. “There’s creating and crafting. And if I make the piece in clay first and then I carve it in marble, I’m just crafting when I’m carving in marble.”

A sculptor, etcher, and more, Gesualdi is best known locally for his P.T. Barnum sculpture, which stands outside the Bethel Library, welcoming people downtown, and the Bethel War Memorial. Both sculptures are impressive and help form the background and bedrock of downtown Bethel, but they only scratch the surface of Gesualdi’s artistic output. On a tour of his house, one gets a glimpse into more. There are marble statues in various stages of creation lining the driveway and yard. Inside are his etchings—many of which are inspired by nature.

He’ll share many of these pieces at his upcoming exhibit, Set in Stone, at the G-Town Arts & Cultural Center in Georgetown from October 25 until November 11. I first met Gesualdi in 2011 when I interviewed him about the Barnum statue for the News-Times. I was excited to reconnect with this artist and learn how his family got to Bethel and how Bethel still fosters his creative vision.

An Italian Connecticut Yankee

Gesualdi’s family is originally from Italy, but they came to Bethel in the 1960s by way of New Canaan and Norwalk. By that time, the Gesualdis had already established deep Connecticut roots. “My dad always used to joke, ‘I’m of 100 percent Italian descent, but I’m a real Connecticut Yankee,’” Gesualdi says.

Gesualdi’s father was also an optometrist and had a longtime practice in town. But beyond his work with eyes, he had an eye—pun intended—for art and was an avid painter who encouraged his son’s artistic interests.

“When I was growing up, I was kind of surrounded by art. There were a lot of illustrators and a lot of artists in the Fairfield County area. It seemed like everywhere I looked, there was somebody who was an artist, and my dad painted, and all his friends painted. It’s just what we all did.”

But Gesualdi was drawn to a different aspect of the world of art. “Unlike everybody else around me, I was more interested in sculpture,” he says. “I liked having the tactile quality of working directly in the material, something three-dimensional, something that I could manipulate and carve and shape. I started carving wood when I was very young.”

Because of this interest, his dad took him to meet Anna Hyatt Huntington, a prominent sculptor who lived on the estate that became Huntington Park. This further fostered Gesualdi’s love of sculpting. And that same love of carving and shaping things with tools infuses the etchings he does. “That’s what etching is to me too, because you work with a metal plate. Everything is actually carved or etched into a metal plate. So it’s almost like making a sculpture that you can then print.”

Move to NYC

In college, Gesualdi studied graphic design and industrial design and moved to New York City in the early 1980s to pursue art full-time. “I stepped right into the East Village art scene,” he says. “There were a lot of galleries, and a lot of the artists of my generation—well-known artists and not-so-well-known artists—were all there within a few block radius. So you couldn’t walk down the street without tripping over another artist."

“We were able to constantly visit each other and challenge each other and bounce ideas off of each other, and you always had to up your game because somebody was going to be stalking your studio at some point, probably at 1 a.m., swinging by, and you didn’t want to be embarrassed,” Gesualdi adds. “I was very much in a hotbed of artistic activity, and I wanted to make a contribution even more than becoming famous or anything like that.”

That artistic community and energy helped inspire him as a young artist. Now, all these years later, he feels a similar sense of community and excitement in the greater Bethel area, albeit with far fewer late-night studio visits. “The great thing about Connecticut now is that we, again, have this group of artists that have come into the area and become very vital to the scene,” he says. “We’ve got Jim Felice, who’s in Bethel, we’ve got Robert Lee Morris, we’ve got Bob Marty and Julie Marty, who have the G-Town Gallery in Georgetown; and the other gallery that opened up in Redding, the Anonymous Society Gallery; and we’ve got Bethel Arts, which is becoming really energetic, to say the least.”

These are just a few of the artists who have been adding to the scene here lately and inspiring him and others. “It makes everybody want to really participate in a big way. Because you want to make a contribution to what’s going on,” he says.

Gesualdi also continues to draw inspiration from his family. His daughter, Daisy Gesualdi, is an artist and works at the New Britain Museum of American Art.

‍_{Back to Bethel}

Gesualdi returned to his hometown in the early 1990s after he lost his big studio space in the city and couldn’t find a new space large enough to work with stone sculptures in. He was drawn back in part because he had family and friends here, but there were other reasons. The aesthetics of the area still speak to him and show up constantly in his work. To explain this, he points to a large and striking sycamore tree in his yard that is reflecting the fading light of day from its leaves. “That’s my tree over there,” he says. “That sycamore is in tons of drawings and etchings. I don’t sit and draw that tree, that tree just shows up in my work. I’ve known that tree since I was three years old, and I’ve looked at that tree, and I still look at that tree, and I still drink my coffee in the morning and look at that tree.”

The impact of these familiar scenes on Gesualdi’s work and psyche can’t be overstated. “There are things in this town that are part of my visual repertoire, and they turn up in my work all the time. And it’s very important to me to visit them once in a while,” he says. “They are motifs that I use all the time that are in this town, in this landscape, that are just embedded in me.”