Gabe Gault
There is a saying by Thoreau: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” Gabe Gault is a portrait painter who, with each and every piece he makes, does so with truth. To de- pict someone as powerful as Cor- nell West or Martin Luther King requires a certain caution and care in order to show humanity in figures who stand as giants to us. Gabe does that with the ease of a brushstroke. When we met in his studio, he had just gotten home from starting the largest mural in the Midwest; some would be panicking about the hundreds of thousands of buckets of paint required to accomplish such a task, but to Gabe, it was just about dippin the brush. He smiled easily as we sat down amongst his paints and spray cans - all that mattered in that moment was finding his truth.
What is it that you create, and how did you start creating?
I like to create work that is based off of people that have done something meaningful in my life, or at least someone I admire. Leaning into my background with the camouflage, it’s all about blending in and standing out. It’s about people who blend into your everyday life but stand out by doing something spectacular.
Can that be someone who you know personally as well as someone who’s globally known?
Exactly. So it could be a globally known person who’s inspired me since the 90s, someone I looked up to or has always had an impact on me. I paint the people that inspire me to work. I want to be the Mike Tyson of my field, an All-Star.
What was the first medium that you worked in? Where did your interest in art come from?
I wanted to be an animator all the way up to college. I dropped out
of college at SMC (Santa Monica College) to intern with my mentor, Rob Prior, he was in the industry for 30-plus years at that point working in animation and commercial art. He does comic books, video game post- ers, and all that kind of stuff. We were working on a 400-page comic book and then everything fell through and I decided to pursue fine art. I was not making any money, I was breaking even. But then it occurred to me that I can do this for a living. From there, I just started painting large scale. Painting the people I wanted to paint. Doing pieces I wanted to do, kind of finding my way and finding my style, which was a whole process of its own.
What year was it when you made your first large-scale painting?
I want to say it was around the be- ginning of 2017. I started working on three-foot by four-foot pieces. That was the first time I worked on any- thing that big. I was scared of using such big sizes. Before then, 19-inches by 12-inches was the biggest I had worked with, but after that first large painting it snowballed.
Was it daunting to go big? Once you did, was there no turning back?
Oh, yeah. 100% I feel like it was a big moment where I was like, “Shit, I can’t do this. I don’t know if I have the confidence to do it.” And I think once you kind of go big, you don’t really want to turn back. There was a turning point where I was working and doing a collab with my friend K-Fish (KELCEY FiSHER) and we did a big eight-foot by eight-foot piece and after that, I knew all I wanted to do was work big. Bigger than life. And now I’m doing the biggest mural in the Midwest. A lot of that integrity came from mentors in life.
I like to create work that is based off of people that have done something meaningful in my life, or at least someone I admire. Leaning into my background with the camouflage, it’s all about blending in and standing out. It’s about people who blend into your everyday life but stand out by doing something spectacular.
Can that be someone who you know personally as well as someone who’s globally known?
Exactly. So it could be a globally known person who’s inspired me since the 90s, someone I looked up to or has always had an impact on me. I paint the people that inspire me to work. I want to be the Mike Tyson of my field, an All-Star.
What was the first medium that you worked in? Where did your interest in art come from?
I wanted to be an animator all the way up to college. I dropped out
of college at SMC (Santa Monica College) to intern with my mentor, Rob Prior, he was in the industry for 30-plus years at that point working in animation and commercial art. He does comic books, video game post- ers, and all that kind of stuff. We were working on a 400-page comic book and then everything fell through and I decided to pursue fine art. I was not making any money, I was breaking even. But then it occurred to me that I can do this for a living. From there, I just started painting large scale. Painting the people I wanted to paint. Doing pieces I wanted to do, kind of finding my way and finding my style, which was a whole process of its own.
What year was it when you made your first large-scale painting?
I want to say it was around the be- ginning of 2017. I started working on three-foot by four-foot pieces. That was the first time I worked on any- thing that big. I was scared of using such big sizes. Before then, 19-inches by 12-inches was the biggest I had worked with, but after that first large painting it snowballed.
Was it daunting to go big? Once you did, was there no turning back?
Oh, yeah. 100% I feel like it was a big moment where I was like, “Shit, I can’t do this. I don’t know if I have the confidence to do it.” And I think once you kind of go big, you don’t really want to turn back. There was a turning point where I was working and doing a collab with my friend K-Fish (KELCEY FiSHER) and we did a big eight-foot by eight-foot piece and after that, I knew all I wanted to do was work big. Bigger than life. And now I’m doing the biggest mural in the Midwest. A lot of that integrity came from mentors in life.
More From Issue 03
What are the biggest lessons that you learned from your mentor?
Working hard and knowing the worst thing that could happen was that you’d have to start over, even on pieces I worked hours on. Understanding that consistency is important. Being consistent is, I think, the biggest key point for an artist because if you don’t have the work ethic you’re not going to go anywhere, you can be pretty stagnant. I feel like that was the biggest takeaway for me. Also, learning you can be famous and successful as an artist. Not that money is a metric of success, but I feel there’s a lot of people who are more famous than me but maybe don’t make as much money. But, there are also people who are less successful than me who make way more money. So it’s a happy balance. There’s always a big balance between making it
as an artist and maintaining your lifestyle.
Are there any contemporary artists you look up to?
Actually, how I kind of got my style was taking my five favorite artists at the time and using what
elements of theirs I liked the most. I thought, What messages do each of the artists teach me? What can I take from those elements and turn into my own? Andy Warhol did a series of camouflage paintings that I thought were really cool, so I started to mess with my own kind of version of that. Shepard Fairey was a top influence for me, he did some portraits of people that are very iconic and paints this stature that I admire. Banksy of course...
I was looking at CRYPTIK and David Choe. James Jean is also a good one, I appreciated his tech- nique and his different mediums, using many little elements in his pieces. Also the artist RETNA, I appreciated how simplistic and easy it is for him to make pieces and put stuff out. The quicker you can produce the better. Some guys take months and months to finish one piece. That’s not what I want to do. I could do that and paint super realistically but that’s what I appre- ciate photography for. I don’t want my paintings to be photographs, a painting should be my own rep- resentation. When I started out, I was doing super-realism, enough that if you saw it online, you’d scroll past because you’d think it’s a picture. That’s something I had to switch up because I wanted to have a looser style. Something that’s loose enough that you’d know it’s a painting. That should be the point. I also like to reference Renaissance painting in my work. I like the style.
Working hard and knowing the worst thing that could happen was that you’d have to start over, even on pieces I worked hours on. Understanding that consistency is important. Being consistent is, I think, the biggest key point for an artist because if you don’t have the work ethic you’re not going to go anywhere, you can be pretty stagnant. I feel like that was the biggest takeaway for me. Also, learning you can be famous and successful as an artist. Not that money is a metric of success, but I feel there’s a lot of people who are more famous than me but maybe don’t make as much money. But, there are also people who are less successful than me who make way more money. So it’s a happy balance. There’s always a big balance between making it
as an artist and maintaining your lifestyle.
Are there any contemporary artists you look up to?
Actually, how I kind of got my style was taking my five favorite artists at the time and using what
elements of theirs I liked the most. I thought, What messages do each of the artists teach me? What can I take from those elements and turn into my own? Andy Warhol did a series of camouflage paintings that I thought were really cool, so I started to mess with my own kind of version of that. Shepard Fairey was a top influence for me, he did some portraits of people that are very iconic and paints this stature that I admire. Banksy of course...
I was looking at CRYPTIK and David Choe. James Jean is also a good one, I appreciated his tech- nique and his different mediums, using many little elements in his pieces. Also the artist RETNA, I appreciated how simplistic and easy it is for him to make pieces and put stuff out. The quicker you can produce the better. Some guys take months and months to finish one piece. That’s not what I want to do. I could do that and paint super realistically but that’s what I appre- ciate photography for. I don’t want my paintings to be photographs, a painting should be my own rep- resentation. When I started out, I was doing super-realism, enough that if you saw it online, you’d scroll past because you’d think it’s a picture. That’s something I had to switch up because I wanted to have a looser style. Something that’s loose enough that you’d know it’s a painting. That should be the point. I also like to reference Renaissance painting in my work. I like the style.
READ THE FULL INTERVIEW IN ISSUE THREE
