According to the American artist Gary Komarin (1951), the best paintings “paint themselves.” He says: You have to get lost in the painting for a time. You cannot simply stand outside like a quiet observer.

I believe he is right, and as a maker, the best part of the creative process is definitively those moments when you lose yourself in the making. But what happens when paintings paint themselves is not that the artist disappear, rather it is in these moments of flow that the artist’s unique originality comes forth.

No doubt Komarin is indebted to the tradition of 20th century abstract art, but what makes his work truly original, is his sense of humor (a quality overlooked by too many abstract artists), a sense visible in both his choice of colors and in the arbitrary shapes in his paintings. The chaotic surfaces of Komarin’s pieces create a vitality and tension between the spontaneous and the considered.

Komarin works are not all inherently abstract, either, as seen in his delightful, natively drawn Cakes (painted on rough paper bags). According to the artist, the Cakes are a marriage between the domestic and the architectural. He credits his mother’s cake baking, as well as his father’s career as an architect, as the genesis for this image.

People often think risk are about jumping off the bridges or white water rafting but creative risks are quiet, real and more difficult to define.  

Gary Komarin