Pat Gladu - ARTIST PROFILE
Some 26 years ago Patrick Gladu was born among silt and stone of Sudbury’s rugged landscape. It was at the “White Mountain Academy of the Arts” in Elliot Lake that he was further refined and polished into an artist. Like the sometimes colorful, industrial landscape of the North, Gladu creates beauty through diverse means. His works explore paint, metal, wood, photography and sometimes…when no one is listening…he plays with sound.
A sculptor, painter, and artistic scientist; his experiments examine relationships between space, shape, contrast, colors, and varied materials. From unassuming roots as a watercolor painter Gladu has taken leaps and bounds with his artistic mediums. It is these risks that have helped to develop him into a young artist of great diversity and strength. Throughout his already many evolutions as an artist Gladu has retained his modesty and his artwork very much speaks for itself. His abstract White Series combine layers of organic shapes and patterns, loosely connected by translucent films. These works give the impression of floating, shape-shifting and
ethereal movement in space. Their varied sizes and formats make each work in this series something unique. In comparison, his Color Series diverge from his delicately created works of White. Still experimenting with pattern and shape, Gladu combines color to stretch the depth of field and creates a layering of planes within the work. His merging of contrast and color elements makes these works seem almost ridiculously intriguing. They pull the viewer in and don’t let go. As a sculptor Gladu branches away from the canvas, but proves that his knowledge of shape and movement are instinctual in his art. The patterns are tighter, more ordered, and yet still retain an essence of bio-morphism. Organic in appearance his forms are stripped of the original intent of their materials and are made into something else; under Gladu’s steady hand they are given new life as art. “How do you differentiate great art from really, really good art? Anything that people are willing to pour time into is worth looking at. Artists have a different way of looking at it, that’s all. Art is a beautiful visual distraction, and I like it that way.
Enjoy my art, think what you will, and it you like it, it’s for sale.”
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