Bill Gusky

Artist Statement

There’s a borderland where the nature of paint’s material substance meets the culture embedded in my body and mind. A liminal zone swarming with life, with discoveries. It’s the territory where this body of work takes its first breaths.

I begin with a ground line. For me it’s three things at once: the ground of all being; the stasis from which all consciousness arises; and the horizon of the endless Midwestern plains where I grew up, the line by which every life and action is oriented.

I unleash paint beginning at this line, guiding it only distantly, intuitively, according to subconscious cultural programming. This often results in waves, loops, or lobes of discovered energy.

Sometimes other forms arise. Each is unique. Each carries its own meaning, its own music.

Next, I have choices. I can refine this first set of gestures, or add similar markings. I may respond to them with slashes, scribbles, with gestures of different qualities and energies. Or I may use them as a skeleton for other intuitively painted elements.

In each artwork I enact new existence, new life, rising from the void. Powered by a synthesis of the nature of paint, and the culture embedded within me, guiding my movements.

These artworks can fail spectacularly. Sometimes I lose the thread. Intuition evaporates. The temptation to overwork can become irresistible. These failures assure me that I’m on track.

I consider them finished when they contain event, peculiarity, and a depth of meaning approaching the sublime.

Each is simultaneously a diagram, an imprint of psychic energies, a votive object, and, strangely perhaps, a unique, functioning, two-dimensional organism.