Gary Mayer: More Sinner than Saint

The artist’s talk “Gary Mayer: More Sinner than Saint”,was a showcase of the artwork created by Detroit-based artist, Gary Mayer. Many different kinds of things influenced his creative decisions, including medieval art, which featured elongated graceful figures that were not quite anatomically correct, Pablo Picasso and other abstract artists, and, most noticeably, religion. Many of his paintings feature saints, visions of hell, and religious landscapes.
The artist went through many of his major pieces, explaining what influenced him in each. He went from completely abstract artwork, to pieces where figures could easily be distinguished, and then back to more abstract forms. He had many periods of specific influence, including his time in New York City, where he became very interested in the swirling motions of water and edgy but lyrical forms.Gary also was interested in a particular image that seemed to be repeating throughout a section of his work; that of musician’s heads with instruments coming out of their mouths atop stacks and stacks of boxes and books, almost as if they were incased from the shoulders down in these prisons. Overall, the Gary’s discussion was somewhat stale. He seemed to think that the audience could simply understand his work for themselves, before explaining it. He also seemed to be trying to impress the audience with his work, rather than explaining it to them. What I especially didn’t understand was how upset he seemed by the hiatus that he took from art to raise his children.Perhaps including stories that the children made up, or their antics in his artwork would create some happier and brighter pieces. Gary seemed to want to evoke the idea of the brooding artist, one that believes that true art is depressing, offensive, and bizarre, but I believe that that type of artist is not taken seriously now.