Gary Alden

Previously an art restorer, I now use a meditative painting process to create biomorphic labyrinths, single organic paths that tangle but are never blocked.

I was raised in Bordentown, a small historic colonial-era village on the Delaware River, in the heart of agricultural South Jersey. I studied art materials and techniques at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. I then learned paintings conservation at a regional laboratory near Cleveland. I spent my working adulthood in California, in Santa Barbara and San Diego, in studios that restored paintings from all eras. After I returned east, a series of near-fatal health crises persuaded me to change careers to information technology and civic social relief. I married another paintings conservator, and now I live in Chelsea, on the Hudson River in Manhattan, in a high rise complex that houses more people than lived in the village where I was raised. (I know because I looked it up.)

My own paintings were always figurative, until recently. Now, despite my Parkinson’s, I take solace in expressive abstraction. I rediscovered a meditative painting technique I developed as a teenager. I have never seen anyone else make paintings like these. If I have been influenc...

University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, A.B. Art History

Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Working Internship

Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, Certificate in the Conservation of Fine Arts, Paintings Conservation (Postgraduate program coordinated with the Intermuseum Conservation Association, Oberlin, Ohio – certificate awarded jointly)

About the Paintings

Each labyrinth is evoked by the historical reference in its title. I start a path with two lines, anywhere on the canvas. I then extend the lines, leaving gaps for future crossings. From that point, the path designs itself organically, with no set plan or structure.

The path has no beginning or end. Each part connects with the whole, so that it forms a single way that may be tangled but is never blocked, so each path is endless. Your eye can travel freely everywhere.

As a viewer, your path begins wherever your eye alights, and wherever your eye travels, you are at the center of your labyrinth experience. When your mind’s eye follows the path, I hope there will be reflection, discovery and aesthetic delight. In my paintings, every part can engage everything else in an immersive meditative experience. I hope people will find the peaceful but playful serenity that making my biomorphic labyrinths gives me.