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Mind and Soul
on Canvas
There are countless ways to approach an artist’s work: through society, politics, and the influence of the Masters. Then there is biography. For Gary Horn (aka G Gray THorn), learning disabilities and mental illness are both positive and negative forces that inspire his subjects and shape his imagery. His life — from a troubled home in America’s Heartland, to service in Vietnam, an unloving marriage, and fifteen complicated years in New York City — has been an effort to live fully in the only identity he has ever had: that of a painter.
This book is less about adversity vanquished and bliss attained than it is a narrative of creativity quixotic in ambition, forged in hardship, and triumphant in perseverance. Both biography and monograph, this book is the compelling personal story of a very human man and an introduction to the art of a gifted contemporary painter.
An art historian by training, museum educator by vocation, and college teacher by chance, ELLEN B. CUTLER is interested in just about anything and describes her knowledge as a little like the Platte River: “a mile wide and an inch deep.” These days she lives in East Boston with her dog Ping, named for the duckling in a 1933 children’s book by Marjorie Flack.
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Published by LNWYD Press in collaboration with Fearless Literary
Paperback, full color with 62 images • ISBN 979-8-218-90853-9 • 190 pages
print: $24.95 • ebook: $9.95
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P R O L O G U E
After putting in all the intended elements, I discovered the real
subject of the painting…is the empty chair. (email 3/21/25)
March 2025 is coming to an end and Gary Horn has started a new painting. This is the first time I have been in on the procreative act. The preliminary sketch is redolent of Picasso’s harlequins and Cézanne’s card players. The pyramidal structure of the composition reminds me that he is a classicist at heart. He writes:
It is rare I feel good at the start of a painting but this one feels good and right. It will be a square composition 56 x 56. It will be a physical challenge but feel the size is necessary. I look forward to immersing myself into the painting.
I see the sketch.My response was a squeal of delight:
Yes, a square composition. It HAS to be a square composition. I hear Brunelleschi cheering you on from the 15th century, and all of the artists who knew they were embarking on something hugely important approving the square and the monumental dimensions.
You’ve headed off to Cézanne and Caravaggio with the card players motif and connected to Picasso (and maybe a little bit of Watteau) with the harlequin/Commedia dell’arte. To say nothing of playing cards and “The Joker” in every pop-culture connection. That is simply thrilling!
… I love the way the pajamas link into the jester’s motley. That’s powerful on so many levels. The composition is that classical pyramid and the grandeur of that plays with the dynamism and casualness of the postures. The lamp at the apex is a power-move: Blind Justice/Lady Liberty, the lamp, the very notion of light, the scales, the sword. All of it.
This will be a remarkable painting. I am sure of that. That empty chair?[J]ustice is the empty chair. The Civil Rights activists must be smugly saying I told you so about now as the government is coming after freedom of speech, freedom of the press and anyone who stands up or disagrees with the conservative fascist government. A card game is…a game of chance and I am applying it to justice which is not by law but by chance or will of the ruling party/class…The empty chair is for us, for those who speak out and the meek silent majority that will give up their rights…
Then on June 26, 2025:
The painting is finished. I think it is my most complete and successful painting. The composition is well-executed, with controlled value and chroma ranges, and light is effectively used to guide the viewer through the composition, revealing the painting’s narrative. The painting also directly engages the viewer, making them a part of the narrative. I spent a lot of time working to get everything right, or as close as I could get it. It is a new height that I will use as a base line to hopefully create better works. It has taken 75 years to get to this point, so now I am finally ready to begin.
The Empty Chair
completed June 2025, oil on canvas, 45 x 45 in
For a while, Gary Horn was mainly a friend’s husband. When I visited them in Charleston, South Carolina, he asked to take some Polaroids; he had an idea for a portrait. I was happy — and flattered — to oblige. He was still something of a cipher to me although I had known him for six years or so. Very quiet, a bit remote. Still waters that I suspected ran deep.
I’ve lived with that painting now since 1994. I don’t remember clearly any other works as early as that one, and few still exist that were made prior to his move to New York City at the end of 1998. On the other hand, I have some fused-glass Christmas pins he made in the 1980s. Fused- glass objects sold at craft fairs provided income for a while. And among my most cherished Possessions is a hand-painted sweatshirt I have worn nearly every Christmas since I received it more than twenty-five years ago. It is blue and — inspired by Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (c.1485)— decorated with a festive scene of Frosty the Snowman on the half-shell, as the North Wind blows.
I have other of Horn’s works, too. Every now and then one seems just to show up. I may know as much or more about his art as anyone other than himself. I am pretty sure I have thought more intensively about it than others have, and worked harder to put it in some kind of art-historical context. Now, however, I am thinking about those paintings in terms of his life, his struggles with dyslexia and bipolar disorder, and his passionate advocacy of social justice.
Gary Horn’s life is a remarkable story....
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