There is a Gus Van Sant the general public doesn’t know — or barely knows. Not the one behind My Own Private Idaho, not the one who made Elephant or Good Will Hunting — but the painter. The one who wakes up in the morning, walks into his garage studio in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, and starts working on a canvas before thinking about a set, a script, or a camera. This is the most intimate side of the filmmaker that Gus Van Sant: Paintings, published by Blue Moon Press, finally brings into the light — and these days, in the city that watched him grow as a visual artist, the book is officially launched to the public.
Blue Moon Press — the Paris-based publishing house founded by Leah Gudmundson, already known for its eponymous subcultural art magazine — has chosen this volume as the first title in its catalog, and the choice could not be more declaratively ambitious. Gus Van Sant: Paintings is not simply a catalogue of works: it is an editorial object conceived as an extension of its subject’s poetics. The hardcover binding is reversed — literally flipped, as if torn apart and rebuilt around a new block of pages. On the exterior, two proof silkscreens, signed and stamped on the back, visually suggest that painting is the “B-side” of Van Sant’s filmmaking career. An editorial metaphor that lands.
“Stylistically Gus’s paintings are very varied, but his essence as an artist unites them: they are experimental. They function as a space to contemplate an idea, play with technique, reflect on characters who are fundamental to his creative world.”
Inside, the book gathers a wide-ranging overview of Van Sant’s painted works in an achronological, associative sequence — not a timeline, but a system of resonances. Different series face each other across spreads, with recurring motifs surfacing across decades and media: watercolor portraits on linen, Matisse-inflected form studies in saturated color, works on aluminum with resin, silkscreen and oil on linen derived from found photographs, Mona Lisas rendered in squares of colored pencil. A visual universe coherent in its heterogeneity — and startling for anyone who thought they knew Van Sant only through moving images.
For Van Sant, the relationship between painting and cinema has never been a clean break. Trained at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s with a dual focus in painting and film, he gradually set aside his brushes to dedicate himself to cinema. His return to painting came in 2011, when James Franco invited him to create a series of works for a joint exhibition at Gagosian in Los Angeles — an occasion that became a genuine creative relaunch. Since then, his garage studio has been a space of freedom: with painting, Van Sant has explained, “you’re free in the sense that there aren’t many people around”.
The volume includes an essay by Professor Dennis Congdon of RISD, titled Lightness in the Paintings of Gus Van Sant, alongside a lengthy original interview conducted by Gudmundson herself, offering an intimate window into his practice. The result is a book that operates on multiple levels: as a critical document, as a collectible object, as a visual manifesto. The launch in these days in Los Angeles closes an ideal circle — the city where Van Sant paints, where his subjects live, where the visual imagination of his films, and now his canvases, continues to take shape.
For further information Bluemoonpress.fr.
