Isle of the Dead Abstract Painting by Bob Gasoi

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This is just a great original piece. I only recently learned about this artist when I was visiting friends in … Read more This is just a great original piece. I only recently learned about this artist when I was visiting friends in provincetown ma a few years ago but had never come across any works by the artist. Needless to say, I was excited to acquire some work by the artist as part of a collection I recently bought. For those not familiar with the artist, I have included his biography below. This is one of a few provincetown art works I acquired and one of two by gasoi, that I am currently offering. This is a wonderful abstract view of the coast of provincetown as it can look when stormy. A mixed media of gouache and watercolor on paper measuring 11 x 10 3/4 inches. Signed lower right. Painting is in excellent as painted condition. Great color and composition. Original matte shows that at some point the bottom of the frame got wet and the matte is ruined. It needs to be replaced. The reason I didnt is because it is the original package and many people like the works as they are and want to keep it that way or someone else might want to change the matte and frame but dont want to lose the backing which is signed, dated, and titled in pen by the artist on the back of the painting. Frame is still good and can be kept no problem. It measures 21 x 18 1/4 inches. If you collect gasoi works or other provincetown art and artists, check my store for the others I am offering. A great chance to pick up some wonderful rare and collectible works.

For those not familiar with the artist his biography from the website his family set up after his death reads: "if my father wasn’t a born artist, then it was an intense drive that emerged around the time he became acquainted with the tooth fairy and kick the can. In school, he was encouraged by his peers to sketch comical pictures of his teachers, and by his teachers to draw signs for school events; at home he was the day dreaming artist that his father berated for not engaging in more “manly” pursuits; in the late 1940s, my father—brooklyn kid, son of an immigrant milkman—became one of the chosen few to gain entrance to cooper union school of art. Even after being inducted into the army and shipped off to korea in 1951, he was known among the other men as “the artist,” sitting and sketching whenever he had a few minutes. As he told it, one day before being sent to the front he was pulled to be a set painter for the sso shows—at least this once, it is fair to say that being an artist saved his life.

Among the last recipients of the gi bill, serving as the army artist in korea earned my father a full ride to attend the ruskin school of drawing and fine art at oxford university in england. During his two years at art school, he traveled around europe, discovering the music of french composers such as claude debussy and maurice ravel and falling hopelessly in love with the city of rome—two events that would come to define his artistic vision from that youthful epoch onward. To rome he would return several times throughout his life. In fact, my father managed to live in rome for stretches of time, but upon each grudging stateside return he would complain of how it was becoming more expensive, polluted, and overrun by tourist-it would never be the rome of his first discovery. He spent his artistic career attempting to capture the essence of his rome circa 1955 as well as to distill with paint what he heard in the music of his favorite composers. After returning to the us in 1958, he met and married my mother, had two kids, and lived the rest of his life as a painter—with and without his family (he left us in time). Among his notable achievements, in 1972 he was awarded an america the beautiful grant to paint a mural depicting human evolution for the sidney, new york public school library. More of my father’s life story is told through his artwork that I hope you enjoy taking in as you explore this site.

So I will now skip to the end. In the final year of his life, my father returned to his beloved rome one last time. He couldn’t afford to live there anymore, so he spent his last visit taking hundreds of pictures that he then carried back to a studio he had set up for himself in san miguel de allende, mexico. I don’t think he was planning to return to rome again in person. As with the music he loved, he planned to paint his way back to the rome of his first discovery and of his endless reverie. My father died in his sleep of a massive stroke in san miguel on the eve of rosh hashanah, september 16, 1997. Accompanied by my father’s dear friend, paul van apeldoorn, I traveled to mexico to collect his few belongings. In his studio, I found the photos he’d taken of rome and three large oil paintings in progress—the outlines of fountains, streets, and hills surrounding the ancient city of his dreams.

Mixed in among his effects—newspaper clippings, family photos, reference pictures ripped from magazine travel sections and art books, I also found a scrap of paper with a poem by 11th century persian poet, omar kayyam (an avid reader from his youth, he stopped reading during the last years of his life – he told me that he only had so much eye sight left in him, and he wanted to save it for painting. But he did still recite the poems he had committed to memory). When I found kayyam’s poem that day in his studio, I could hear his voice as I read—in a sense, my father’s last words to me: "and that inverted bowl we call the sky, where under crawling coop't we live and die, lift not thy hands to it for help -- for it
rolls impotently on as thou or i."

I know he loved the elegant bitterness of these words, relished the sparse grandeur of the lines. And though many experienced him as a whimsical soul, a painter who irreverently mixed classicism with fantasia, he came to live an ascetic life. Not that he denied himself worldly pleasures. But he gradually shed all but the essentials of his life that needed to be carried. In the end, he was a nomad with two small bags, almost entirely filled with art supplies. I believe that, for my father, kayyam’s poem resonated with a dignity in letting go of any pretense of special treatment in death. He was here the day before the high holiday. On rosh hashanah he was gone. I couldn’t help but think that he had been working toward this clean exit. Luckily, his work endures. Please browse robert gasoi’s site, enjoy, comment, and query." See less