Six Pieces by GUSKY

Apex

I was walking on a Florida beach lined with swanky condo buildings. A few scattered openings allowed regular folks like me access to the water. That afternoon, a shark had been left to rot in the sand. Perhaps, a sports fisher caught it and it died before they could figure out how to remove the hook without losing a hand. Anyway, it had been in the sun long enough that the turkey buzzards found it. Strangely, they didn't dig in. Not while I watched them. The apex scavengers just stood by over the dead apex predator. Waiting for God knows what.

Recovery

I’d been cleaning out my bedroom closet when my wife got COVID. She’d sleep through parts of the daytime to get past those first few days, sun blazing into the room, surrounded by a handful of things she needed and all the bric-a-brac I’d laid out to sort through. I peeked in one afternoon just to check on her, opened and shut the door quickly and quietly, and as I walked away I had a flash image in my head of life, the work of it, the memories not neatly packed away but strewn about. So much unfinished work - the work of recovery, of returning to ourselves.

Swing

There’d been a family gathering at my sister-in-law’s place. We took the kids for a walk after dark. There was a little park with the usual swings and slides. My niece leapt onto one of the swings and went to town. She had a lot of energy. She’d sweep up as high as she could make the thing go, yelling all the while. There was this moment when she’d hang at the swing’s highest point, and it stuck in my head. For a brief second, she wasn’t just a cool kid riding a swing at night. She was any of us, or all of us, cresting a life experience, hanging in the dark, stuck with trusting gravity and this thing we’re riding, whatever it is, to carry us somewhere we hope we’ll want to be. Screaming our lungs out.

Broken Argument

Part of my art-making life involves working intuitively, plumbing the psychological depths. There's an archaeological sense to these explorations. They open channels for me to other ways of thinking and seeing. I have sketchbooks filled with drawings like this one.

I find myself drawn at times to pairings. I suspect it’s partly because I find human relationships bewildering at times. What holds us together seems so tenuous sometimes, and so dependent on indirectness, obfuscation, and all the little liquors of dishonesty.

Co-op City of God

Several kinds of forms are frequent visitors when I work intuitively. Among them, you’ll find plant-like things and strange little architectures. Relationships between the forms become part of the game, and meanings arise quite on their own — a phenomenon I find endlessly fascinating. These books of paintings have the feeling of little illustrated medieval psalters, even though there’s often no connection between one page and the next. Sometimes, particularly when I’m working late at night, I feel like a monk in an unknown religion I’m discovering, laying down its tenets and parables and visual scriptures, but keeping them secret, except for these glimpses here. Leaving them to be discovered by others.

Tragic Portrait

I’d just finished seven years of focused work using specific images from cartoons that stuck in my head during that long, anxious, dizzy experience of growing up where, how, and with whom I grew up. Thanks to technology, I was able to find the cartoons in question and then comb through them for individual frames that were particularly pungent. I tore apart and built new images using those frames, to create new meanings that are more relevant to what was happening to me as I now see it. This exercise I’d mysteriously set myself onto was apparently about recovering something, maybe a sense of power over all those childhood memories that still hang around like flakes in a snow globe.

This is one of the first paintings after all that—when the cartoon stylings still hung on my hand, but I was returning to working from intuition. This portrait built itself in front of me, element by element, combining, I suppose, cartoon and classic abstract elements, as though my subconscious mind was ready to return to forward-looking work, and was feeling a bit overwrought.

Gusky is a multidisciplinary visual artist and writer. He has exhibited throughout the United States, and his artworks are featured in many private collections. Gusky completed his BFA at Pratt Institute and his MFA at MassArt. Among varied distinctions Gusky served as visiting artist at the International Workshop and Presentation on Contemporary Experimental Art at the University of Kalyani, he was awarded a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, he served as artist-in-residence at the Museum at Lower Shaker Village in Enfield, New Hampshire, and he served on a panel of distinguished art blog writers held in New York City.

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