Today we talk about

Shane Guffogg

Two very acute eyes that look at you intensely and seem to penetrate your soul. This is the first impact with Guffogg; never a simple, relaxing meeting; always an engagement into discussions about philosophy, ethics, art, colors and music.

A “whole” artist involved in painting, sculpting, writing, music and composition, whose main interest is the investigation about paint in itself and how it becomes light and space.

The canvas becomes something akin to a battle field in which Guffogg engages himself, sometimes in a dance, sometimes in to a fight with the space. Space and light have been “dominated” by him or, better, “subdued” as a live material.
In any case, paint, canvas and light have, for him, a soul.

His real signature mark is the one of a ribbon, bending, twisting, turning, curving, folding in on itself, invaded by light that creeps in between the folds, inter-playing with color in a way that enhances the drama of the scene.
Sometimes the ribbon becomes only a still point, an extreme tiny ball point that seems to weave the canvas and goes from the center to the edges or vice-versa, but capturing the sight converging it inward; a sort of a centripetal force that attracts towards the center like a black hole that absorbs and contains everything.

He challenges himself with the old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, giving birth to an entire body of works that represents his own personal “dance” with a painting of Leonardo.

But he uses paint to challenge himself every single day because painting for him is a never ending relationship with a “being” — the canvas, the paint, the light, the space — all elements forming a real body, a physical being that he needs to subdue, to interact with and finally he needs to love.

 

Shane Guffogg has been to Naples – Italy with his works

Let’s explore his works

 

Shane Guffogg was born in Los Angeles, California and raised on an exotic bird farm in the San Joaquin Valley. His interest in painting began while a teenager, when he traveled to Europe and the former Soviet Union and was exposed to the Masters. He received his B.F.A. from Cal Arts, and during his studies he interned in New York City.

He relocated to Los Angeles, where he lived in Venice Beach and worked as a Studio Assistant for Ed Ruscha from 1989 until 1995. His work began exploring the iconography of Ancient, Classical, Renaissance, Modern and Contemporary cultures, and the relationships among the various times and peoples. During this exploration he found that painting is one of the few art forms that may express what language cannot. The resulting work contains its own language of sign and symbol, and in its patterning, visual depth, and light, simultaneously seems to refer to emotion, to the human spirit, and to the unseen worlds of Quantum Physics and Super String Theory.

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