Walk at Sunset

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Gus Moran is a local artist who has lived in Bridgeport, CT for most of his life. Moran's parents are from Muslin Albania.  He has traveled widely and has studied at the Academia, in Florence, Italy, the Silvermine School of Art and the Paier School of Art before receiving his degree from Southern Connecticut State University.

He was on the faculty of the Silvermine Art Academy, when it was still accredited and was one of the leading avant-garde art schools in the US.

His style of painting owes much to the Abstract Expressionist of the 50's, with its lush paint surfaces and broad gestural strokes.  Many of his paintings are abstracted landscape and compositions using the figure.

In an artist's statement from an exhibition at The New York Square Cinema Gallery, Moran states, “My Paintings stem from the imagination, compositions formed by the experiences and emotions of my life.  I always begin with something from nature, which can be the figure or a landscape. More is happening at the beginning, then I eliminate some of the form as the painting develops until what is happening at the beginning becomes unaware, and the subconscious takes over, moving things around to enlarge the boundaries of experience. I want to tell a story, but one that is not obvious, and I get to that point by using recognizable shapes and abstract form.”

According to the artist, this painting has an entirely different painting underneath it, which was created in the late 1980's, and exhibited in New Haven, with the title “Walk at Midnight.”  He later became dissatisfied and began reworking it, leaving the composition intact but playing with the colors for the next six months.  Ultimately, the painting was finished in 1996.  Moran says, “I needed the intensity of color for this composition and I feel the expressions and body language conveyed what feelings I was looking for.  I just had to crank up the color to make the painting work, so I renamed it “Walk at Sunset.”

Look closer: notice the jewel tones of the colors, emerald greens and ruby reds.  Look at the juxtaposition of the various faces and figures in the painting. Notice how some lines and shapes are shared by two different faces or bodies.

This painting has a sense of motion and movement that Moran created by loading his brush with paint and by the expressive movement of his hand, as he paints.  The artist paints this way very consciously, knowing that he is leaving this trail for us to follow. He states, “I worked to create the illusions of movement more with color­­—rich, vibrant, pulsating color, more than the actual figures in motion.”

Notice how the artist distributes the rich color all over the canvas, not spotlighting a particular area of the work. Moran also states, ”There was a certain mood I was hoping to find. It had something to do with the hour of day, or in this case, the evening.  This scene does not take place in America—it is in Italy, just before sunset when the brilliant light of the sun, before it drops out of sight, turns everything into jewels.  So I tried to push the color to the extreme, thick layers of contrasting pigment to exaggerate the form.

The artist explains his inspiration in this way. “…life gives me the desire and the need to create.  The human form is of the utmost importance for me, it also forces me to remember I'm human. I try to describe our humanity through the compositions I work with, which are simply the things we go through as humans.  The painting you saw is the way I interpret things: struggle, calm, violence. I paint what I know.

He has had artist residencies at The Vermont Studio Center, the Nall Art Association in Vence, France.

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