Gabriel Prusmack : Painting the town!

Gabriel: I’ve been doing artwork all my life, but I really went after it about 17 years ago and I never stopped because spray painting was so fascinating to me and you can do so much with it so quick, so fast and still have time to add details. It’s just kind of liberating because it’s something that’s so off-the-charts different. It always changes, too. There’s so many people out there experimenting and you can use those ideas. Like on this wall, I didn’t even spray paint anything on these walls. I literally poked the can and let it explode on the walls instead. That’s how fun that is. Those kinds of experiments create new ideas whether you hate them or not.

Gabriel: The pink lines represent joy that is freedom, and for me where I get my joy is from Jesus Christ. He set me free so that I could be free. So that’s my identity. It’s the ‘Be free line’ … to be set free. It’s everywhere and what it represents is your life. This is what joy looks like in your life. It goes everywhere. This is your life going all over the place – up, down, everywhere, all over the place. That’s you. And if you live that joy inside of you, nothing can get you down.

Gabriel: I did the turtles at Menard Park (McGuire-Dent Recreational Center) and I just did the Causeway murals. That was fun. That was a pretty big one. It was a six-week project. I went to the city and talked to them about doing it, and they asked me to do some renderings so they could see what it looked like. For this project (21st and The Strand), I had a friend that asked for me to do it. I also did the ‘Welcome to Galveston’ mural on the side of Yaga’s Café.

Gabriel: My work consists of contrast within everything I do. I look for diversity in colors and design crossing semi-realistic images. Lots of my recent work has become experiments, recognizing the abstract inside of everything. Being free is a giant part of identity, who you are and why you do what you do. Using design to dissect images is my interpretation of focusing on identity. My bright colors are part of the Joy that I choose to see in everything I touch or interpret. The images I use are meaningful to my own experiences. Sometimes my images are of a dream state of what joy really looks like in my head and heart.

Published by Bobby Stanton