Defacto Painting

Eric Guenette is an American painter currently living in Portugal. He primarily utilizes common household paints and materials to create abstract works such as Latex house paint, spray paint; simple wood for structural decorative framing and canvas and fiberboard for surface materials. His paint application utilizes small pieces of cut framing wood or recycled plastic used as scrapers and rarely applied with brushes. The work has an intentionally rough, imperfect and organic feel all the way through his process. One of his biggest artistic influences was his grandfather Marcel, who was a golf shoe maker at Footjoy in Brockton, Massachusetts for thirty years. "He could build anything with his hands. He would often be found in his small wood shop behind his house in Winter Park, Florida, toiling in the central Florida heat creating, fixing and repairing all sorts of things. One day, he ripped apart a lawnmower and created at go-cart with random pieces of wood for my sister and I to play with. His spirit inspires me to this day. This is why it is important to to me to be involved in every aspect of the artwork, from the construction of the homemade frames, stretching house painter drip cloths as canvas material and finishing most of the artworks with white pine decorative framing." As a self-taught abstract painter and professional graphic designer for more than 25 years, Guenette combines traditional graphic design principles with unique painting processes to create this unique style. In many of these works, there is a repeating theme of curved shapes which Guenette sees as capturing "abstract portraits." People en masse, striving and struggling with all of the challenges of living in these current times. This became a focus of his earlier works during the pandemic and has continued to this day.