Interview by Jimon

1- How would you describe Gabi Dunayski?Stubborn, emotional, eternally barefooted, pasta eating, floor laying sacrilegious artist.

2- Where do you currently live and create?  I live in Laguna Beach and a lot of my practices take place there too. Majority of paintings happen in my LA studio.

3- How long have you been making art and how did it all start?  I’ve been making art since I was really young. If I could trace back the earliest memory it would be in church, in biblical coloring books. But when I really began to paint, it was after my grandparents passed. My grandmother always told me that I was going to be a painter, and in a lot of ways our traumas mimicked each other. When she died, my painting was at the foot of her hospital bed. That sort of thing really imprints on a human. After that, drawing & painting became an act of expression of anger and mourning. That was the first time I think I realized that abstraction, for me, lends much more closely to the truth of life than realism ever could.

4- Did you study art or is it inherent?  I didn’t study; I found life outside of school, much more applicable to my practice than life within school.

5- What is the inspiration behind your paintings?  The perverted nature of Westernized Christianity.

6- Do you believe a person’s life story affects the way they see art?  Entirely.

7- It seems you paint in layers, and each layer can be a finished painting on its own, how do you decide when a painting is done?  When the painting absorbed more of the feeling than I have.

8-What is the longest you have spent on one painting?  Probably the longest I’ve ever worked on a piece is three months. But I would like to be clear that some of the best works I’ve made in general take hardly any time at all. If I have too much time I’ll over think, and I’ll question and that’s when the painting drowns.

9-What is largest number of paintings you have worked on at any given time?  Four.

10-Is your identity as an artist separate from your identity as a person?  No.

11-If a movie were to be made about your life, who would you pick to play your part? I’d hope they’d cast someone random, I mean someone untrained. I don’t know anything about acting, but if it’s anything similar to the actual act of living and they’re required to replicate me, ha-ha. Lots of fuck ups would be necessary.

12-What advice would you give putative collectors?  I’m not sure I can offer much advice to them, once the painting is done I’m done. I guess if you want to come to understand artwork, or rather the painterly way through collecting. Make a point to buy three paintings. Buy one painting that makes you feel the harshness of life. That puts a finger in your worst wound. Buy another that shows you the softness of life. The tenderness of humanity. Place them by each other to remind yourself of the contradiction and fragility of being. Let some years pass. Then search for a painting that holds both emotions but doesn’t dull either. You’ve found an extraordinarily good painting. Don’t ever, ever rid yourself of it.

13-Do you have a place/person/thing that you visit for inspiration?I spend a lot of time reading through my childhood bible, listening to old sermons and worship songs, analyzing theology, and coloring in biblical coloring books. Visiting these stirs nostalgia and extracts blotted out events from my memory. And then I take them to the studio and expose them on canvas.

14-How much planning is involved in your paintings or are they purely spontaneous? There’s no planning when it comes to composition. There’s no visual expectation, surrounding what the recollection or regurgitation will resemble. The bodies are completely alphabetical and the tension between them becomes dialogue. And that’s why you get this sort of hysterical, grotesque, sexual mosh pit. The cerebral elements of my practice happen outside of the studio. I can’t mix them. So after I spend time with the memorabilia or when I’m studying I’ll write. Three words, Three pages sometimes and that’s where I get my titles. Such as “Alter Call At A Purity Conference And The Guest Speakers Fucking His Intern”, “Mania After The Missing Purity Ring” or “Day Of The Rapture And Me And All My Friends Are Surely Going To Hell”. They act as the catalyst. As the trigger point.

15-When you are painting, do you paint for yourself or for an audience?  Me, just me. Sometimes it’s necessary to notice the audience, but I find that much more relevant in my performative practices. And I never find it necessary to appease them. A good paintings job isn’t to be liked.

16-If you could have one of your pieces at any museum in the world, where would it be? In all honesty, I’m not sure, but I would like it to be placed in the religious section. Possibly by descent or elevation of the cross or massacre of the innocents by Ruben.

17- Name three things you can’t live without in your studio?  Big walls, dirty floors and espresso.

18-If you could have dinner with 3 artist living/dead, who would be at your table? Paul McCarthy, Cecily Brown and Peter Paul Ruben. Actually no sorry Ana Mendieta.

19-How would someone find you on Social media? Instagram @gabidunayski_

20-If you were asking the questions what question would you ask and please answer the question?  I think I would’ve asked myself about my other artistic practices.

Do you have any other artistic practices? If so, when did they start?  Yes, although painting takes up the majority of the time between my practices I also take performative photographs, and videos and I have hopes of soon exploring sound individually as a medium. I do spend a lot of time writing but I’m not sure it is different from paintings- they rely on each other too much. I always used myself as a medium in a performative sense. At least since I was 11. But it wasn’t really until I came across a recollection in the church that I couldn’t paint that I had to differentiate the practices entirely. The feeling just wouldn’t stick to the canvas. I tried 3 or 4 times but couldn’t. There’s something different about flesh. Real flesh. It evokes a different type of reaction and can explore a motif with a different level of potency.

21-Please name the first thing that comes to your mind while reading the following:

Art=tension

Food=pasta

Sports=anatomy

Politics= debate

Sex= art

Luxury=ego

Poor=charcoal

Rich=paint

God=war

Religion= rape

Picasso=grandfather

Afterlife=retrospective