Human/Nature: Animals Go Underground In the Paintings of Matthew Grabelsky
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42, which is sold out. See Matthew Grabelsky’s new solo show at Thinkspace gallery here.
Matthew Grabelsky had studied tradition in Florence, lived in the cultural nuclei of Europe, but hadn’t yet found the idea that would set him apart as an artist living in the twenty-first century. “While I was living in Paris,” said Grabelsky, 36, “I was mulling over how to express my love of mythology in a way that could be contemporary and relevant to the world in which I lived.”
Though he’d grown up in New York, it wasn’t until he headed back there on a quick vacation that all the pieces converged and kindled into a vision that has informed his work since.
“I was riding the train one day, and I snapped a photo of a quirky couple that was across from me. When I looked at the photo afterwards, the idea of adding an animal head popped into my mind,” he said. “After spending most of my life in New York up to that point and having ridden on the subway for countless times, it was only after being away from New York that I was able to see the environment in a fresh way.”
Not that he shuns tradition. Years earlier, he had sought out a small, private painting studio in Florence and ended up at The Angel Academy of Art, which taught methods of drawing and painting developed during the Renaissance. This studio stripped the art down to its individual parts. They started with drawings of antique sculptures, then plaster casts. Then they learned to paint in oil, starting in black and white renderings of plaster casts and moving up to colors in still lifes. All the while, they spent half the day every day with a nude model, drawing the body for the first two years, then painting.
They took a master’s interest in every technical element of the media used, such as graphite, pencil, charcoal, and paint. They taught Grabelsky to create an oil painting starting with preparing his own canvas and panels, and including underpainting, overpainting, and glazing layers the old masters used.
It didn’t hurt that he was surrounded by the gorgeous city of Florence.
“Living in Italy was an amazing experience, because I was constantly surrounded by art,” Grabelsky said. “The whole city is basically one big piece of art. Being surrounded by art made me feel the importance of it and also made me feel that art’s not this separate thing you go and see. It’s with you all the time.”
Later, Grabelsky lived in Paris, where he analyzed and studied pieces in museums and did his own experimental work. He created his own technique to accomplish the look he wanted to achieve.
After that subway ride in New York, he found the subject matter that has maintained him since, creating works such as one of his favorites, “Lincoln Center.” In the painting, a couple sits on the subway: a man with the head of a leopard and a woman with a leopard-print dress. The man lays one arm around the woman’s shoulder and with the other, show her a GQ Magazine, the cover of which shows Amy Schumer dressed as Princess Leia in a gold bikini, sucking C-3PO’s finger.
…if it makes me laugh while I’m working on it, I know it’s something I want to do.”
“When I’m making my work, I mostly try to come up with something that makes me smile,” said Grabelsky, who now works out of L.A. “Especially in the beginning when I’m composing something, if it makes me laugh while I’m working on it, I know it’s something I want to do.”
The work has a universal modern-day appeal, Grabelsky says, that gets a reaction not just from the art community, but from most of the people who see the paintings. Our species’ tradition of placing an animal head on a human body, however, dates back thousands of years.
“Mythology is just something I’ve always been drawn to. For me, mythology creates this sense that there’s something under the surface of our minds,” Grabelsky says. “In daily life, you sit on the subway, or in any situation, and there’s so many things going through people’s heads that you’re just not aware of if you’re just sitting there. But it’s there. There might be one hundred people in a car, and everyone has their own particular world they’re living in. Mythology, especially bringing it out the way I do, through the animal heads, is a window into what’s going on in their minds.”
His work displays mythology within mythology, the ancient artistic and religious practice of giving a human an animal head, and the very current love of Star Wars, set within the space of the New York Subway. It’s the sacred within the mundane and present.
“When you study different mythologies, it’s hard not to be struck by the numerous ways that they overlap,” Grabelsky says. “They’re allegorical, meaning they represent these common themes throughout human experience—love, hate, suffering—so I think that mythology is a way to represent these common themes.”
In the painting, the leopard is looking at the woman, displaying that universal joy we get from showing something funny to someone we love.
“The girl has this smile on her face part, ‘I can’t believe you’re showing me this ridiculous thing’ and part, ‘This is absolutely hysterical,’” says Grabelsky. It’s a silliness Grabelsky shoots for in his own work, packaged within his serious study of painting.
He’s creative in the way that encourages his audience to be creative. He’s not telling a particular story, he says. It’s more like setting the stage, arranging props, and handing over some characters for each of us to tell our own story about what we see. He exaggerates what we each do in our own way, assigning personalities and life stories to the humans we see across the aisle, based on the snapshot we get of their lives in the distance from here to there.
His use of color encourages the eyes to roam around the piece. For example, in “Lincoln Center,” he replicates the yellow of the leopard in the shoes, the glint of C-3PO, and in the poster for Lincoln Center Film Festival behind their
heads. He gets part of his sense of color, he says, from his grandmother, who painted in an Post-Impressionistic style. “Her sense of color really influenced me,” he said. “She has a wonderful sense of color. It was always around me.”Luckily for him, Grabelsky grew up in an artistic family. (His father supervised production of Dirty Dancing.) He thought art was just going to be part of life, but not his career, so he started out studying astrophysics. Art and science are both an exploration, he says, and starting in science still informs his work today in ways so viewers might miss.
I’m a very analytical person, and I have a technical approach to achieve the level of visual realism that is in my paintings. I often approach composing and executing a painting almost as if I were solving a physics problem…”
“Astrophysics definitely informs my process. I’m a very analytical person, and I have a technical approach to achieve the level of visual realism that is in my paintings. I often approach composing and executing a painting almost as if I were solving a physics problem,” he said. “What I know about how light works, with reflection, refraction, and scattering, is applied in creating visual effects such as the reflections on the metal walls of the subway cars.”
Behind the leopard’s head in “Lincoln Center,” the light reflects off surfaces both shiny and dull. On the seats next to the fox’s head in “Franklin Seat,” it dips into the plastic seat. In the crook of the neck of the giraffe in “Times Square,” the viewer gets a peek at a man looking at the couple across the way. His smile almost suggests it’s Grabelsky, in a moment of inspiration for one of his paintings.
There might be one-hundred people in a [subway] car, and everyone has their own particular world they’re living in. Mythology, especially bringing it out the way I do, through the animal heads, is a window into what’s going on in their minds.”
To tackle these compositional and technical challenges, Grabelsky uses reference images of the subways, friends modeling in his studio, and Google SketchUp to get the perspectives and reflections just right. Recently his paintings have been set on the 1 Train, an older-style subway with metal walls that includes a variety of textures that have Grabelsky modeling and calculating for countless hours to get the right look.
“A lot of time, I think I’m the only one that’s going to see it, but if I don’t get it correct it will drive me insane,” he said. “Getting all these reflections to work and be realistic is very difficult, especially when you don’t have the model there to see what the reflection would be.”
He may have gotten this tendency from his grandmother’s painting style.
“I remember how particular she was about what she liked. She was very clear about saying, ‘This is great,’ or ‘I don’t get this, it’s terrible, why would anybody want to look at it?’ It can be very harsh. But I also just appreciate that because I feel like, as an artist, especially with your own stuff, it’s really important to be really critical. Not only negative, but positive, to have a clear sense of what you’re doing. You need to know: Is this right or is it not right? You can’t just say I’m a genius, this is great.”
Though he tries to get it right in the composition phase, he’s found himself a third of a way through a painting and having to give in and starting over.
Mostly though, his work is about the joy found in creativity.
“Art possesses a lot of power to capture our imagination and to make us feel. Art is energetic. How that power is used—how that energy is harnessed—is up to the artist,” he says. “My goal is to give people a powerful visual experience through which they can let their imaginations roam.”*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose issue 42, which is sold out. See Matthew Grabelsky’s new solo show at Thinkspace gallery here.
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