Former St. Petersburg Times news artist saw, and made, art everywhere

Joseph Tonelli taught his daughters to look at the world differently. Literally. See those lines? See those colors? The light?

“He just had this really cool way of looking at things around him that I think really shaped me,” said daughter Maria Tonelli Smith, who grew up to become an artist. “He was so interested in life and how things work.”

Tonelli spent 30 years helping people see the news, as a news artist at the St. Petersburg Times and later the head of that department. His career spanned a stretch of time between when the newspaper started printing in color and when everything went digital.

“You could see his eyes light up,” said Roy Peter Clark, a Times columnist and retired Poynter faculty member who worked with Tonelli. When Clark approached Tonelli with a story, “you could see something change in his face where he was imagining something that could work.”

Throughout his life, that light showed up for his own artwork, his love of food and music and people, too.

Tonelli died Aug. 12 at 96 of natural causes.

‘He loved so many things’

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Tonelli discovered art early after winning a poster contest and earning a summer internship at Carnegie Mellon University. He continued studying art there for years. He served in the Navy near the end of World War II, where he used his skills illustrating the military newspaper.

Tonelli started his career as a news artist at the Pittsburgh Press and later followed a colleague to St. Petersburg and the Times.

Here, in his 40s, he met his future wife.

“I actually stalked him,” said Diane Tonelli, who was 24 at the time and working in the same department. When she found out her colleague was getting a divorce, she started leaving notes on his car with her phone number.

“Then he called me one night and he said ‘OK let’s go for a walk on the beach, I have to talk to you,’” she remembered. “He lectured me the whole walk on the beach about leaving notes on guys’ cars.”

They had coffee and dessert, and Tonelli asked for a proper date.

The couple had two daughters, Maria and Vanessa, and settled in a house on Pass-a-Grille Beach.

His daughters remember their dad always singing, sometimes to their younger selves’ mortification when that singing was opera and the location was school car line. Daughter Vanessa Tonelli Slade remembered her parents’ Friday night date nights, and how they’d take the girls to Wendy’s on the way to their grandparents each week.

“Just that little Wendy’s night out was the biggest thing with him,” she said. “He just made everything better.”

In living color

Tonelli’s career came in an era of change in journalism that included the introduction of color printing.

“It opened the door for the most adventurous photographers, for the most creative designers, and for this amazing team of artists at the St. Petersburg Times, and Joe became the director,” said Clark. “They were creating — with their hands, with their eyes, with their imaginations — they were creating deadline art of the highest order.”

Tonelli and his team sculpted, made portraits, illustrations, cartoons, maps, graphics, charts and more to show the news of the day.

He retired in 1993 and never did learn to use a computer. But Tonelli kept making art in his home studio. He traveled to Italy. He hosted memorable Thanksgiving meals. He restored his home. And he often did all of that while singing a little song.

“He loved so many things,” Diane Tonelli said. “He was just totally alive.”

Poynter news researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

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