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While the pandemic ravaged the globe, Joe Stublick’s world crumbled.
His audio engineer gig as director of event technology at the Melville Marriott was paused indefinitely, his marriage dissolved and he soon found himself back living in his parents’ basement in Brentwood.
But it is there where he now creates paintings that are garnering international attention.
“It originally just started off as a hobby, something I wanted to get back into,” Stublick, 35, said. “I desperately wanted to make creativity a part of my life again. It just felt like everything turned black and white in a mundane and uneventful way.
“If you spoke to me this time last year I would have told you that my life had lost all purpose,” he continued. “I was painting pictures just to try to not think about those things.”
During his teen years, Stublick envisioned his adult years as a musician. Playing music allowed him to “decorate time,” whereas now he “decorates space,” and it seems people prefer his ventures into the latter, he said. Stublick didn’t manage to record a hit record, but his paintings have made their way to exhibits in New York City, Spain and Italy, and will debut in France at the Carrousel du Louvre this fall.
“In 12 months time, my artwork brought me to Italy,” he said. “And in the 12 years I’d spent on music, my music didn’t bring me anywhere.”
Creativity lost and found
Throughout grade school, Stublick took a liking to animation and comic book artistry, spawning a possible career direction at an early age.
“When I was younger, I was always into art,” he said. “I was drawing before I was writing my name.”
But when he picked up his first guitar as a teenager, art went out the window. He played in numerous bands before he found himself a girl and settled down. Work was going steady as a live audio engineer, which kept music in his daily life, but left a void where creativity once nestled.
It was not until the pandemic struck, paring him down to his core, that art and creative expression came back to him.
Making a mess
In 2020, he first took to traditional brush work with acrylics. Then, he came across pour paint videos, a style he first discovered through his cousin years earlier.
Pour painting involves first painting a canvas in a solid base coat, typically white or black. Once that layer dries, the artist pours the paints onto the canvas in one lump sum, separately, in a shape or pattern or however else they desire.
Skirting brushes, Stublick tilts his canvases, summoning gravity to move his paints. He also uses knives and even gathers a variety of household items, including dustpans, turntables, hairdryers and even air compressors. When using the latter tool, things get pretty messy, such as Stublick’s bed, draped in a paint-covered comforter.
To make his paintings more interesting with a sense of depth, he mixes floetrol, a latex based compound, and silicon oil into different colors before his pour.
“Now, the density of that paint has changed,” Stublick explained. “So certain paints will sit on top of others and break through and you get all sorts of cool effects from it.”
For some final touches, Stublick occasionally adds gold flakes or flicks final colors haphazardly onto the project. Finally, he coats the dried piece in a sealant, preserving and securing it.
Foreign affairs
When browsing Stublick’s work, there is a clear progression not only of his artistic abilities, but of his success. He omitted base coats on many of his smaller earliest works, leaving them looking raw. More of his works also lack the final sealant.
Now, all his works are sealed in polyester casting resin, many of them for good reason: they must be fit for digitalization and travel.
In the spring of 2021, an Italian-based curator contacted Stublick and invited him to the “El Dilla” art exhibit in Milan. The Brentwood artist’s abstractionist expressions were a perfect fit for the event, the tile of which translates to “the unknown” or “what lies ahead.” His art appeared on touch screen projections, enabling viewers to zoom in on every detail.
This was the first of many of Stublick’s moments of disbelief.
“I went there to see it with my own two eyes because I still needed to know that this was really real,” he said. “And I was also thinking, ‘This is either the only time this is ever going to happen, so I should definitely go see it, or this is the first of many and for the same reason I should go see it.'”
Stublick has also shipped artwork for display in Spain, Greece and France. Unforunately, his artwork was held up in customs and missed his slot at the Carassel De Luve expo, which he had been particularly excited for when he received the invitation.
“You know when Bugs Bunny’s eyes used to pop out of his skull and his tongue would roll out of his mouth?” he said. “It was one of those moments for me.”
The artist said his work was still on display digitally, and the physical version made it back home safely. It may be on display in France this fall, he added.
‘These paintings kind of saved my life’
The same weekend as the Carassel De Luve expo, Stublick had artwork on display much closer to home at the New York Art Expo, where friends and family could see his work prominently displayed in a leading art city.
Stublick continues to grow his artistic endeavors and spread his name as the year continues. His work, a bio and his take on modern art’s impact on society will appear in “Art Anthology 22,” a book to be published out of Madrid this July. He also has made arrangements for his art to appear in Barcelona this December for the “Brain Cake” exhibit hosted by MADS art gallery.
The Brentwood artist will also display three of his works — “The Invisible Line,” “Dichotomy” and “Up In Smoke” at the Hamptons Fine Art Fair July 14-17 at the Southampton Fairgrounds.
Recently, Stublick spent time reflecting on his journey when he applied for a month-long residency at Volcano National Park in Hawaii. If selected, he will create, collaborate with other artists, and deliver lectures to tourists and others interested in his art.
“If I have to give lectures, I can talk about how I pretty much had to be forced into the lowest point of my entire life in order to really ask myself what’s important. “These paintings kind of saved my life, that’s how depressed I was. So I want to take all that positive energy that has come from this and I want to channel it back into the world, and the best way that I can do that right now is continuing to share it.”
