April Gornik
Sag Harbor, NY
APRIL GORNIK
April Gornik was born in 1953 in Cleveland, Ohio and there attended the Institute of Art . She completed her graduate work at Nova Scotia College of Art. Although Gornik does not identify herself with a particular art movement or school of thought, she realizes she is considered a landscape painter.
Her 1983 painting, Light Before Heat from the Parrish Art Museum’s permanent collection and included in her video by The Artist Profile Archive, exemplifies a chief characteristic of her unpeopled landscapes of the imagination- the work immediately evokes the essence of a place without the viewer being able to specifically locate the image geographically. Her Recent Paintings and Drawings exhibits from 2014 and 2016 at Danese/Corey were filmed for her profile in addition to an interview in her studio in Sag Harbor, New York.
Gornik’s work is included in part in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Hood Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Nasher Museum of Art. Gornik is a founder of The Church, a non-profit arts organization based in Sag Harbor, NY.
“When I was at the Nova Scotia College of Art, I was reading all sorts of texts about- at the time, what was popular, intellectually, in art schools, which was Structuralism. So I was reading a lot of Levi Strauss and Piaget and people like that and was trying to make art that I ended up thinking was really an attempt to illustrate those texts as a kind of homage. What I was really doing was a very romanticized kind of excuse for art. And at the point that I realized that I didn’t want to be an illustrator of conceptual texts, I started to look for something else to do… and ended up, to my own surprise, painting a landscape in my studio after I’d graduated from college and had traveled around Europe a little bit and was kind of exploring myself and my soul. I ended up in my studio being fascinated by light, and one day thought of this image that just seemed like the perfect thing to make and to make it, I had to use paint, and to paint it I had to use a flat surface. So instead of doing the kind of constructions that I was doing just previous to that, I made this flat object, stepped away from it, and not only was it a painting, but it was essentially a landscape painting. Very abstract, but I recognized it right away.”
April Gornik - 00:08:29
Studio in Sag Harbor, NY
“When I think about light, I think about brevity...transience. Paintings have the uncanny ability to hold all the things that an artist thinks about...the experiences and the changes of mind, all of the things that you go through when you’re making a painting….that painting holds that….so if you can get that plus light, you have something.”
“I’m trying to gather an unruly force of nature together, like the ocean, and give it a certain kind of form. I want to get the weight of the surface of something or what it implies so that the tension and release is prevalent in my work.
I don’t think of beauty being a simple thing, or a pretty thing, I think of beauty having gravity and disturbance. It’s not loveliness, I think of beauty in terms of a fundamental light and dark complexity….beauty is something that can be snatched away. It’s incredible and finite.
You can trust your psyche to make art out of the healthy place, the healthiest place... even if it’s pulling disturbed images because that act is a healthy, expressive act. There’s nothing that has the same effect in society as art does…it is one of the most importantly humanizing things we have at our disposal.”
