Bryn Gormley's art begins with a question. For him, making art is a way of reaching thoughts and feelings that are difficult to access through words. His work is colorful, layered, and intuitive, using abstraction to process emotion, memory, curiosity, and uncertainty.
Gormley discovered art as a teenager, at a time when verbal expression felt difficult. Drawing and painting offered a new kind of freedom. In his late teens and early twenties, he made thousands of works and experienced a period of intense creative growth.
In his twenties, Gormley opened an art gallery in Brooklyn, New York, focused on local artists. Over five years, the gallery presented nearly forty exhibitions and showed the work of more than one hundred artists, becoming part of the Williamsburg and Greenpoint art community. During this time, Gormley continued making his own large, colorful oil paintings.
After stepping away from art for many years, Gormley returned through an unexpected medium. While working in a sign shop in San Francisco, he began using leftover scraps of colored vinyl to make small abstract panels. Over the next seven years, he created more than five hundred of these works and found that the process was also a way to share art with others.
More recently, Gormley returned to painting, beginning with acrylic versions of some of his favorite vinyl collages. His current work reflects a long path away from and back toward making. It is rooted in abstraction, personal history, and the belief that art can help us access parts of ourselves that words cannot always reach.
I started an art gallery in Williamsburg Brooklyn with my friend Alex in 2002. The gallery was open from 2002–2007. We had 7 formal shows a year. Special thanks to Sophie Landers who did a stellar job managing the gallery during the final 2 years.
I hadn't painted in years due to harmful petroleum additives in artists' oil paints. To solve the dilemma, I developed my own line of oil paints.
My client got his painting and the non-toxic paints yielded more vivid colors than the commercial alternative and I was finally able to paint again!
In this case vinyl is a sticker that comes on a big roll and is a solid color. When I worked at a sign shop I would collect the scraps that couldn't be made into signs, then cut them into smaller shapes and stick them on a foam board to make art.