Gary Halsey
81 Sterling Place #2
Brooklyn NY 11217-3304
Tel/Fax 718-398-7521
Since 1991, I have conducted a small business as a mural painter. This
has involved collaboration with interior designers and art directors for
architectural settings ranging from hotel and restaurant to residential
interiors. Clients have included the Pierre Hotel, Club Tatou, & Copper
Canyon Lodges, entailing landscape & some portraiture in large scale
mural and in easel-sized paintings. I've also restored paintings and drawings
in traditional media of unknown artists and decorative finishers, some
extending as far back as the late 18th century. Set/prop work has included
background scenes for several "Off-Off-Broadway" plays, mechanical
scenics in conjunction with Den Studios for television, such as the CBS
"Late Night with Conan O'Brien" show. I've illustrated various
book covers, including (in addition to The Moon and the Sun), Jane
Eyre, Steppenwolf, and Jonathan Levi's A Guide to the Perplexed.
I've also made illustrations and graphics for promoting various local
productions in theatre, music, & modern dance. In 1989-1991, I began
work as a mural painter for Modeworks, a company which, at the time, largely
made signs, displays, and murals in the form of faux frescoes, and acrylic/oil
replications of various old masterworks, such as Fragonard and Magritte,
for use in the interiors of Express, Limited, Bendels, and other clothing
stores.
After graduate work in 1982, I found mural and other painting work only
periodically, necessitating work at many different jobs, mostly in building
construction/interior renovation. For example, I designed and built the
portable walls used in the 1982 Art Expo in Cincinnati, OH, and in 1984,
did the renovations for the studios of Rockshots, Inc., a greeting card
company in NYC. Between 1986 and 1989, I worked in high-end interior renovation
as a finish carpenter & as a site foreman for a NY construction company.
In 1985-1986, I lived in London, England, supporting myself with working
in illustration, decorative painting, or in carpentry, often working with
Irish construction crews. Periodically making sorties from London to continental
Europe, I explored cities, such as Antwerp, Paris, Barcelona, Lisbon, their
cultures, and the artworks of painters and architects which I'd previously
admired only in books or studies in a rather disembodied way during my
years at university.
I received a BFA in painting, magna cum laude, from Wright State University
in 1977, attended the Arts Students League in 1978-1979, studying drawing
and anatomy under Robert B. Hale, and using two full scholarships and a
teaching assistantship, I received an MFA from the University of Cincinnati,
in 1982. From 1970-1974, I was enlisted in the US Air Force, attaining
Sgt. grade, and master technician status as an electro-mechanical systems
and team training instructor in Minuteman ICBM technical support and maintenance.
Although I had a casual interest in art during early youth, it was during
my stint at Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls, Montana, when I saw the paintings
of C.M. Russell, F. Remington, and other "western" artists, that
I first attempted to make a painting, the act of which offered me a future
not of repairing bombs, but of a craft with a much friendlier posterity.
Between honorable discharge from the military and entry into graduate art
school, I found various positions as artist-in-residence, and freelance
artwork in the Dayton-Cincinnati area which involved local communities
in arts projects, especially murals and sets for musical and theatrical
events.
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