Abstract Without Brushes

“It seems like a dream now, It was 40 years ago. I was an MP stationed in Saigon, drafted, spent my whole tour there,’69-’70, got out four months early. The paintings are not out of PTSD or anything like that, I had all that way before I went into the army—bad childhood, abusive father, alcohol, all that when I was a kid…nothing that Vietnam did to me.”

Eskimo Blue

The work is not typical. Though the self-taught Gusmann is not a pasticher—not a painter of timid overlays of current popular styles, not tentative in working out his influences. His work is not forced, labored, or indulgent.

Gusmann: “I never knew when to quit working on a painting…I’d think, should I add more in this corner, or paint over that I’d overwork it and wreck it. Finally I trained myself to stop...to back off a painting sooner. My girlfriend helped me that way and she got me to start showing my work.”

Many of his paintings in his show at Starlight Studio and Gallery have an intensely human scale. The hand he uses to paint with is evident in the bold swipes and swirls of impasto colors that have congealed on the surface of the canvas.

After 30 years working for Buffalo China and using every spare piece of surface material that he could scrounge to paint on, and using techniques adapted from Jackson Pollock, painting on the floor, painting with viscous motor oil rather than the enamel car paint Pollock was known for, and with no presumption about ingredient integrity, Gusmann moved his work through loss of job to a diagnosis of cancer, through months of chemotheraphy to recovery and current remission. He said painting gave him a way to fight the pain and boredom of chemotherapy and the months in and out of the VA hospital.

Gusmann’s work bridges a connection between the earlier generation of European immigrant painters, artist insurgents bucking the 19th-century American scenic tradition of easel painting and the free-wheeling painters of the present era whose work comes alive in glimpses of bravado and passion of the “action” moment, what Barnett Newman called the “zip.”

His paintings are evidence of the growing appeal of the “action” genre in post-modernist art, the gluey, glutenous thrall of glopping paint and hopefully have it work into glissandos of living pigment—rich, sensual, and defying intention.

—j. tim raymond