Artist Spotlight: Greg Auerbach

Name: Greg Auerbach

City/State: Los Angeles, CA

Website: www.hollywoodgraffiti.com

Contact: greg@hollywoodgraffiti.com

 Greg Auerbach is my kind of guy. As a true artistic spirit, he is ultra creative, super intelligent, thoughtful, hyper-observant and slightly neurotic. He has a delightfully checkered past sprinkled with the kind of life experiences you’d find in the classic films he so adores.

 Tapping into his background in film studies, he approaches his Hollywood Graffiti series in a cinematic manner. Greg seems to construct his paintings as if he were writing and directing a movie. Much like his favorite films, he has created stories painted with main characters sprayed over collages of in-depth sub-plots, character arcs, settings, themes and dialogues. The near-impossible feat he has accomplished is that of creating motion pictures in singular, static images.

 Auerbach is not afraid to try something new, and he goes all in when doing it. He has no formal art training. He’s just a romantic and an adventure seeker who blindly follows love and his passion, which has quickly led him to a promising career in fine art. Greg has been rewarded with early success, but make no mistake; he has not been handed anything.

 He is an absolute workaholic. Just hearing him describe his work schedule exhausts me. Eighteen-hour plus workdays are commonplace at his studio. Long days blend into long weeks of binge working, and his prolonged disappearance from normal society is ordinary.

 What Greg may lack in formal artistic training, he certainly makes up with hustle, grit and determination. This is not to say he is untalented in any way. He has simply found a way to create beautiful and intricate work that doesn’t involve the elaborate toolbox of a classically trained artist.

 Instead, he utilizes his cinematic eye, complex knowledge of film and scrupulous attention to detail to craft complete paintings with masterful composition, content selection and layering.

 Currently Auerbach’s Hollywood Graffiti collection can be viewed at the Arclight Cinemas in Hollywood located at 6360 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90028. Greg will also be showing at the Beverly Hills artSHOW in October and at Art Basel SCOPE Miami in December.

Where are you originally from, and how did you end up in downtown L.A.? 

 I’m 28. I’m originally from Oradell, New Jersey. I was born and raised about 15 minutes outside of New York City. I ended up downtown 3 1/2 years ago as the result of a misguided romance. We moved into downtown LA, shortly after we both moved on, but I had an amazing space to create in. This became my first real “studio.

How has your geographic location influenced your work and affected your career growth?

 I think that Los Angeles was the perfect place for me to introduce my work. It’s entirely topical being that Hollywood and LA are often one in the same. That being said, there are a ton of forward thinkers here and creative minds, and that would be my target audience, people who like to take something at face value and then delve in as deep as you can muster.

Where has your art taken you, and what people have you met through your work?

 Since I started doing this work, I’ve come a long way as an artist, a person and a man. I’ve learned a lot through the experience about disappointment, success, notoriety and utter obscurity. It’s definitely been a crazy trip so far. Physically, I’ve gone around the country showing my work, and I’ve met countless people. It’s amazing to me how a common ground such as art opens the doors to meeting people and starting conversations. I’ve had the opportunity to meet some really cool people, some of note, many of merit, but I’m just as happy to meet someone of obscurity as much as someone of note. I’ve yet to meet my future wife.

Can you tell us a little about your education and training? 

 My mother might tell a more colorful rendition of my education, but here is the basic recap. After high school I went to Ithaca College for film… for one semester. I took a semester off, then dropped out and worked as a waiter. I got pretty antsy to go back to school so I applied to get back into Ithaca, went back and met a girl in an airport who went to Syracuse. We went out a few times, she was cool, but the school was even better. I transferred to Syracuse. This was the school I had always wanted to go to, not specifically Syracuse, but a huge school with old buildings, lots of people and cold weather. I went there for a year; the film program wasn’t what I had hoped for so I transferred to the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan. After two years there I got a job in LA, finished up with classes at USC and graduated 2 years belated. I also take post grad courses in writing and art, but just for fun. I was never really trained in anything other than film or photography; rather I stumbled into what I’m doing now. One day I decided to make a piece of Alfred Hitchcock stenciled in spray paint over vintage murder mystery headlines. I taught myself to build a canvas, cut a stencil and bought some cans, and it’s really grown organically much in the same fashion. I’ve learned as I’ve gone along.

Your work is both simplistic and meticulously detailed. How did you develop this unique and contrasted style? 

 Thank you! To answer you, I’d really stress again that it’s been a very organic growth and experience. The work and I have both developed together over the years. I love the word simplistic because I think that this is something I really like about this series; it’s accessible while still being intelligent. It’s got depth to it that needn’t be explored, but if you do I think it makes the experience much richer. I think the detail came from a yearning for me to push the medium. After making so many of these pieces, I started to get a sense for how different features and techniques articulated better than others and I think that detail in my work is necessary, especially when the pieces are 6 feet tall. I’d love to explain the development further, but I haven’t a clue how I’ve gotten the opportunity to keep showing work, let alone how it’s come this far.

You have an obvious affinity for classic celebrity figures. In a pop culture world now dominated by figures like Miley Cyrus and Justin Beiber, how do you keep figures like Audrey Hepburn, Alfred Hitchcock and Ernest Hemingway relevant?

 As someone hopefully once said, “Classics are Classics.” There’s a beauty and intrigue to the iconic Hollywood types that I don’t think will ever disappear. They also lend themselves really nicely to my style of work, deep black silhouettes over collage. I don’t think I’m keeping them relevant, but I hope that I’m helping them to stay in people’s minds as recognizable people. They’re all such talents; it would be great to find out that I perpetuated them in anyone’s mind(s). After my untimely demise, should I end up in hell, I’ll start on a Miley Cyrus/Justin Beiber piece.

Your work ethic seems impeccable. How do you stay motivated and focused enough to keep grinding out solid work like you do?

 Well firstly, my work is my only source of income. Secondly, I want free time to think about new work, entirely different techniques and to play with paint. So ideally, I’d like to work enough to put myself ahead so I have plenty of work to show, finish all of my commissioned work and still have time to explore other ideas as well as have a beer.  Unfortunately, I find that I’m often working 14-18 hour days just keeping up with the shows I have, but I plan on fixing this in the coming year. I’ve done a large solo show this year, I did a small solo show, I’ve done at least 8 group shows, I’m doing Scope during Art Basel…. pretty much I’ve had a crazy enough year working 100+ hour weeks for most of it that I think I’ll take some time to recoup come next year.  

 My technique is fairly simple. I love what I’m doing! I’m really interested in it. I love getting paint on the walls; I enjoy the smell of acrylic and newsprint. That and I’ve developed a strict regiment of stimulants to help me work: I drink a lot of caffeine, I smoke some pot when I need to relax, I play records, watch old movies and every once in a while I’ll do a psychedelic while working (Sorry mom).

The life of a hard-working artist is often that of solitary confinement. How do you balance your artistic isolation with maintaining a healthy social life?

 I’ve always been a loner. I love people, but I’m entirely content with being alone. I’ve never had a problem with spending long periods of time by myself. I think it’s often meditative although there’s always the possibility of your mind going awry, especially when you’re pulling back to back 36 hour shifts at work with nothing but a few slices of pizza and some naps to divide it up. At that point, it’s entirely possible that I’ve gone slightly insane. I go out with friends when I can, I date here and there. I find that if I get out of the studio for 2 nights a week that I’m ok working the other nights. Still, I wouldn’t call my social life healthy; I’d usually call it “hanging on by a strong thread.”

The graffiti/street art world can be a strange and mysterious scene, which seems to fuel its popularity. Can you give us a little insight of what it’s like to weave in and out of the street world and the gallery world?

 I don’t know if I’d call myself a street artist. I’ve put work out on the street, but I’ve done way more indoors and on canvas. I’d love to be a street artist. A while back I met with the artist Septerhed. I was asking him a million and one questions about his long-standing love affair with street art and he told me that when artists talked about getting off the street and into galleries, he wanted to do the opposite. He wanted to get out on the street more and more. He told me he wanted to be a vandal. I want to be a fucking vandal too! I don’t want to destroy property, but I also don’t want permission to make a statement. That’s the freedom that street art gives you, you’re doing what you want, wherever you want it and for the sake of everyone who has to see it. Hopefully it’s doing something right, whether that be provoking thought, making a statement or just inciting some intrigue.  

 In January-March I went on a rampage. I was putting up work everywhere I could find a wall. I was mixing up paste, riding my motorcycle with a tub of wheat paste, a few markers, a can of spray paint and as many posters as I could hold. It’s refreshing. It’s so validating to go and put up work anywhere you please knowing that it’s a little naughty, a bit illegal and you’re gonna reach a collective audience that you might not having the work in some gallery. Also, it allowed me to put up work that otherwise wouldn’t get shown. I can simply say that putting up work for free is the perfect juxtaposition to trying to sell work and that it really lends itself (at least to me) to balancing out the business side of the art game.

What can we expect to see next from you and Hollywood Graffiti? 

 I’m doing a lot of work with bullet shells and butterflies. I’m playing with clay, casting molds and concrete. I’m going to start doing a lot of stuff under my studio name “Gregory Auerbach Studio” because it’s not always Hollywood anymore, and I plan on making a mess, kicking some ass and learning even more about who I want to be and what I want to say.