Paul Wysmyk

Drawing and painting is at the heart of my creative art practice. I take imagery from many sources including my sketchbooks and personal photos of places, people and objects, art reproductions, etc., and I combine or collage these source materials into an imagined space. It’s not about literal representation but more about aligning elements to tell a story and animate a space. From those visual materials an intuitive narrative emerges that is part personal history and part dialogue with art history, particularly the modern movement. My paintings are not about how I see objectively but about how I think, it’s my thinking process visualized.

Artist Statement

I believe that handmade objects have an innate power and that the spirit of the maker somehow lives on in the object. I can feel this when I look at past and ancient art and artifacts. It is as if the artist lives on in the piece. Culture, ideas, observations and emotions are encoded within and can be accessed by a current viewer. Therein lies the value of art for me. It is more than technique, it is more than style, and once you have seen it you cannot turn around and see the world in the same way as before.

A lot of my paintings take place on a beach. It is a stage set for a personal narrative. Simple elemental materials are transformed into transient tiny worlds lasting only until eroded by waves; creation then followed by destruction. There is a kind of empowering primitivism that records my view of the world, which I see as one of chaotic complexity: careening geopolitical events I do not fully grasp and new technologies that are almost incomprehensible in their infinite intricacy. How do you make your way?

It is impossible today to be completely informed. To map out some order in this complexity I subscribe to a sort of urban primitivism. That is my process for engagement in art making. It consists of a guess, based on the bytes of daily information that come my way, plus my personal experience, current observations, hunches and instinct about what will work. I then cross my fingers and try to make my mark by drawing, wiping, brushing, dripping, glazing, and scouring. Imaginative possibilities open up in the making, and then somehow at some point it just looks and feels right.