TSUNAMI Print

"Paul Volker's witty and beautiful paintings hover seductively between book illustration, outsider art and conceptual painting. His cartoons feign at nativity and legereté but behind the curtain are darker tales and a wonderfully precise control of paint." --BBC Art Documentary Film Maker, Ben Lewis _________________________________ Paul Volker is a very collectible artist in the genre of humor, whose body of work exceeds some 3000 original paintings created over the last 40 years. A native of Columbus, Ohio, Volker is best known for his groups of paintings focused on specific themes. The largest group includes nearly 1000 small works created under the general heading “Wild Beasts“. Almost all of his works are in the hands of private collectors around the world. The paintings offered here primarily reflect a recent shift towards abstract imagery, yet they still retain the vibrant brushwork, composition and sense of contradiction evident in his earlier narrative pieces. Volker’s paintings are more than images on a surface. They involve equally the image and the surface itself, and with the hand-written title, produce not only a picture of some thing, but an entirely complete thing in itself, ready to hang with no need for framing. The technical mastery of Volker’s work reflects his near-obsession with the recycling and reuse of materials, and a preference for non-traditional materials. All of his paintings were createdusing discarded or mismatched exterior acrylic house paints. Most of them are on plywood. However, from 2015 to 2019 Volker created many works on “Volkerstone”, an exclusive surface medium he created using recycled paper pulp mixed with special glue and layered onto a substrate made from discarded Styrofoam, then sealed with a clear acrylic. The surface of ‘Volkerstone’ feels like actual stone. The material is both lightweight and durable, lasting for centuries without deterioration. The artist jokes, “in case of emergencies this painting can be used as a flotation device“. Volker studied art at The Ohio State University. He worked as an illustrator for Bleecker Publishing (NYC) in the 1980s and as assistant director at Acme Art Company in the 1990s.