Tom S. Fricano — The Afterlife of Process

In every era, there are makers who treat process as inheritance. For them, repetition is not routine but devotion. Method, practiced with discipline and restraint, becomes its own form of permanence.

A printmaker, painter, and educator, Tom S. Fricano (1930–2000) spent nearly five decades exploring the dialogue between material, pressure, and time. His body of work reads like an etching itself: patient, precise, layered through return.

Born in Chicago, Fricano trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, earned his B.F.A. from Bradley University in 1953, and completed his M.F.A. at the University of Illinois in 1956. Early recognition followed through national exhibitions and awards, including honors from the Library of Congress and major print exhibitions in Chicago and Philadelphia. In 1960, a Fulbright Grant carried him to Florence, where he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti. There, centuries of European technique sharpened his understanding of line, pressure, and restraint, influences he would later translate through an American sensibility.

Returning to California, Fricano became head of the Printmaking Department at California State University, Northridge. His classroom functioned less as a studio of production than as a discipline of attention. Among his students was my grandmother, who studied under him for many years. She spoke not of instruction, but of pauses. Of how he would wait before printing, allowing the room to settle, as if stillness itself were part of the process. From her, I learned that artistry was not performance. It was patience, practiced again and again without urgency.

Fricano’s philosophy extended beyond printmaking. “Good art,” he once observed, “has to deal with all the principles: design, color, message, and dimension. Emotion matters, as does intention.” His teaching reflected that belief. Method was not a means to an end, but an ethical position.

One of his most evocative works, Portrait by Frans Hals, reinterprets the exuberance of the Dutch master through intaglio. Where Hals relied on brush and velocity, Fricano translated vitality through incision and pressure. The energy of the image emerges through accumulation, held in the resistance of copper, the weight of the press, and ink drawn slowly into dampened paper.

Intaglio is among the oldest and most exacting printmaking techniques. An image is cut into a copper or zinc plate and filled with ink. The surface is wiped clean, leaving pigment only in the recessed lines. Dampened paper is laid over the plate and run through a high-pressure press. The force pulls ink from incision into fiber, leaving a faint embossment that records the pressure of the artist’s hand. Each line must be cut deliberately. Each impression requires preparation, alignment, and return. The resulting depth is not optical but physical. It is weight made visible.

In Fricano’s later Butterfly and Sunspot series, abstraction replaces reference. Light, dust, and air are translated into rhythm. Each mark becomes a measured breath. Each print records faith in the physical act of making.

Fricano’s prints are not images alone, but traces of the maker. They carry evidence of attention: incision, pressure, alignment, restraint. These gestures link studios across generations through shared devotion to craft.

Legacy, Fricano reminds us, is not scale but continuity. The press, the workbench, the repetition of method. Each act builds upon the last. What remains is evidence of care: pressure in paper, the persistence of the hand.

At Acanthus Home, we speak of the Afterlife of Objects, the way craftsmanship preserves meaning beyond its moment. Fricano embodied the Afterlife of Process. His career demonstrates how devotion to method becomes an enduring form of beauty.

His work, held in major public and private collections, continues to carry authority without spectacle. A reminder that permanence is shaped not by grand gesture, but by the faithful repetition of care.

There are artists whose names did not travel widely, yet whose work shaped the hands that shaped us. We preserve these lineages through attention, through restoration, and through the careful keeping of process itself.