Gregg Sindici, Artist
For my paintings, I apply acrylic paints and mediums to wood panels using brushes, palette knives or even my fingers. Oftentimes, I will add other materials such as paper, fabric, gold leaf, sand or even metal to my paintings to achieve a desired effect. When I start a painting, I often have a vision in mind of what I intend to produce yet, more often than not, the end product looks vastly different from my original vision. While this process bothered me greatly when I first started painting, I have now surrendered to the phenomenon by just letting the paints and other materials take me where they want to go – I need only remind myself to sit back and enjoy the ride. Sometimes the ride will produce a bold colorful painting, and sometimes it will produce something gritty and textural, and occasionally a combination of the two.
As the artist who has the privilege of applying the paints, mediums and other materials, I create pieces whose purpose is to provoke curiosity and intrigue in the mind of the viewer by causing the viewer to ask questions like “how did he do that”, “what is underneath that layer”, or “did he put the red on before the blue or vice versa”? For me, that is what abstract art is all about. When painting, I am not producing an abstraction of some figurative object or scene; instead, I produce paintings whose composition speaks to the viewer in private hoping only that my painting has indeed sparked the mind of the viewer.
For my sculptures, I use hot rolled steel – and occasionally aluminum – which I will often pair with some natural material such as beach rocks, driftwood or other natural material. For me, there is something magical about combining a manmade material like steel or aluminum with natural materials like beach stones and driftwood. By combining these different materials, I produce pieces that create a juxtaposition for the viewer’s mind to indulge whether it be between raw metal that has been shaped into an elegant form or between metal that has been coupled with a natural material like stone or wood. The composition of my sculptures reflects both minimalist and Asian/Zen design styles and themes.