“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…”
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