Gornik: Well, it’s a beautiful balance of modern and ancient technology, the computer and the paint and the charcoal sticks. [Laughs] In the charcoal drawings, the paper gives you light automatically; you don’t have to concoct it out of paint. You just have to not wreck it. Big difference. I started messing around with Photoshop in the mid-nineties when I was trying to be a more organized person, and it was very exciting to be able to play with it. It quickly became a sketch tool for me—great for collaging, because I can do it so quickly—and I’ve been working with it ever since. My impulses can keep up better.
But when I begin a drawing or painting, it’s similar. I have a sketch, but I need to feel out the composition and image by drawing, and as I do, I’m thinking about how I’m going to emphasize or limit aspects of the image. I can push or discard detail while I’m drawing something out, and also while doing an underpainting, which I usually do, often with pretty shocking, contrasting color. There’s also an irregularity to real nature that I can pull back out from a photo sketch, and it’s an asset because of the rich complexity that’s in nature’s irregularity. It’s something I can imitate from nature, but I can’t “grow” it the way nature can. And then there’s the point where the sketch has to just go away, which is different for each work.
Rail: Your work makes me think of Georgia O’Keeffe, and her relation to Alfred Stieglitz’s photography. At a time when everybody was trying to make photographs look like paintings, Stieglitz was trying to make highly rendered photographic images of things. He thought there was a sensuality and a beauty to that, and a personal quality. O’Keeffe picked up on some of that precision in her more abstract images. I know she’s not your favorite artist, but I thought—since you’re interested in light and dark, and photography in those early days was totally light and dark—you might find some common ground with their intentions as you try to translate light.
Gornik: You’re right: her work is often a little too overtly symbolic for me, although she did some paintings I’m crazy about. I’ve never loved Caspar David Friedrich’s symbolic ruined cathedrals, but Monk by the Sea is so, so great. I don’t want my work to be heavy with symbolism—although of course I’m inviting it, like every artist, since people always want to find meaning in art and will project into it in whatever way they need to.
Rail: I showed you some of Stieglitz’s “Equivalents,” and you responded favorably. They relate to your expanses of clouds and even include bits of landscape on the margins like yours, but they are symbolist rather than symbolic—they evoke associations but don’t have a particular reference, like how O’Keeffe’s skulls connote death. The British poet Charles Tomlinson, who was friends with William Carlos Williams (“no ideas but in things”) and went to visit O’Keeffe in New Mexico, talks about her “distanced vision”: the combination of strangeness and objectivity that she imposes on her subjects, with particular reference to her “Jack-in-the-Pulpit” series from the 1930s. He felt those paintings had that strange objectivity to them, like those things you say photography shows you that you wouldn’t have invented. He said he likes artists who preserve that strangeness, who “penetrate … while refusing to merge.”
Gornik: For me, nature is the ultimate “other,” and I want to keep it that way. I like that it stands apart from me. I am merged with it, of course, like it or not. And objectivity is not my goal. I totally relate to Steiglitz’s “Equivalents,” which I hadn’t realized are a series. Thanks again for that introduction! So my editing of my work is all subjectivity and projection.
Rail: It seems like you maintain a balance. That sort of editing leads me to another painting, Lightbound (2025), which unites various aspects of your work. It’s detailed, but it’s mysterious. You like dualities, and the horizon divides it horizontally, right in the middle, between sky and water. There are two circular bursts of light: one up in the clouds, and the other one seemingly reflected in the water, only it’s not really a reflection—it’s something else, a bit uncanny.
Gornik: That uncanny reflection gives the painting a different sense of depth, and weights the bottom. You can call it a reflection, but I think of it more as an echo or an opposition.
Rail: Can you talk a little more about that?
Gornik: Well, it contains certain kinds of metaphoric possibilities, because it’s a little abstracted, but it still connects with what it’s echoing in the sky. The black in it is too deep and exaggerated, so to me it’s kind of a drain or a whirlpool or a black hole appearing in the water.
Rail: It’s very symbolist to me. It definitely has a strange objectivity, and it makes me think that Lightbound could refer to our universal situation—how we’re stuck in this structure where every day the sun goes up and down. We’re bound in our orbit, you know, where we have to see that light.
Gornik: I wasn’t thinking of the title quite like that. I was thinking of the way that light holds both clouds on the top and the hole in the bottom in perpetual balance. It all has a slight spiral, moving ultra-slowly in place, for me. But I have to be honest: anything I’ve done that’s within the last year or two, I will not be able to fully explain. I never see everything in the work until later, if at all. Sometimes the work marks a moment of realization or revelation, but a lot of my work I’m still wondering about.
Rail: It’s a great example of how you adjust internal relationships to bind your landscapes together. But what about your Annunciation painting, dedicated to Antonello da Messina?
Gornik: Antonello da Messina did an Annunciation (Virgin Annunciate, ca. 1476) I saw about twenty years ago in Palermo that depicts a woman wearing a blue veil, and who has a plain, clear-eyed face—no gold halos. She’s alone at a lectern, and one hand is on her book and the other hand is slightly raised in front of her. She’s looking a little left of the viewer, like she’s focused on seeing or hearing something. That’s it. It’s the coolest, most abstract Annunciation anyone ever painted. As I was starting to make what became my Annunciation painting—I probably shouldn’t have called it that, but oh well, I was raised Catholic—I was horsing around with the photograph I was working from, and I started to see, or imagine, rain falling. It’s not in the photograph, but I imagined a presence of rain touching the ground, with a little light held within, or passing through it. It’s a modest painting, and I thought perhaps this is what da Messina was trying to do: make something quietly revelatory.
Rail: The light is softer, and it has a very particular—maybe we could say “poetic”—quality to it, very different from the more dramatic lighting of Lightbound.
Gornik: It is softer, more modest. Or stealthy. But it has its own strength, which resides in the fact that it’s quietly putting things in front of you that you wouldn’t necessarily think are important at first glance. It’s like everything is held in a super quiet moment, and it needs a little time. The glow within the rain sort of faces off the light in the sky that’s on the other side of the painting, and that literally connects the two. But I didn’t think of the da Messina painting until after I had finished it. It was again an entirely retroactive moment when I realized I’d painted something in common with that great Annunciation that I was so struck by.
Rail: So it was something that you were living with for a while, not necessarily thinking about. And then it kind of emerged.
Gornik: Exactly, a big surprise. Maybe the connection was lurking in the back of my mind, and then suddenly it was so obvious. Of course the Annunciation depicts a liminal moment, so maybe I was inclined to look for it unconsciously. Hard to parse. It’s part of the long meditation on liminal states that I’ve been obsessed with for the last few years. It’s a very personal thing, and I don’t expect viewers to have the same experience, but in honesty that’s where I have been coming from.
Rail: Well, for a religious person, the Annunciation is a moment that transforms the universe. And for you, that comes through in a different kind of light—through personal loss. It’s the antithesis of the eclipse painting, which gets very contrasty. This is more subtle.
Gornik: I don’t disagree, but if you’re looking at light before a shift, like an eclipse, or if you’re looking at a moment on a marsh where there’s light that kind of bisects something that’s barely there—they both are passages, or portals, or moments that are versions of similar dramas.
A moment can change the history of the world and your life can change with a moment. The gift comes from the way those experiences can be a glimpse of something that’s corporal and solid and as fundamental as death, and can simultaneously feel miraculous, or extraordinary, and spiritual, like a kind of a spiritual recognition. Or intimacy in immensity.
Rail: That’s very moving. In a related vein, could we talk about World of Light (for GMH) (2026), your painting dedicated to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was very religious.
Gornik: Hopkins has this phrase in his poem “God’s Grandeur” that describes light that “flame[s] out, like shining from shook foil.” I got very stuck on that phrase, and I wanted to try to achieve that in some way. I love that ferocious, righteous poem. And it took me a very long time to make that painting.
Rail: His images, and the way he makes language so alive—it’s great. He doesn’t just invoke religion, he embeds transformation in the words.
Gornik: So beautifully put! Yes, he’s amazing. And at the end, when he finally says the Holy Ghost is going to come and shelter the world with bright wings, it’s like, “How dare you be so immense!? And how dare you be so hopefully sure.” What a claim.
Rail: That’s a sort of celestial painting, but what about your painting that alludes to a more modest poem, Wallace Stevens’s “Of Mere Being”—The Palm at the End of the Mind (2026), which starts deep and stretches out for the sky.
Gornik: That painting is so odd for me, and I literally just finished it before this conversation, so I can’t be too clear about it. For one thing, it’s between large and small. The light in the sky pulls you hard towards itself, partly because you’re in a kind of a chasm of trees and shadows at the bottom.
I wanted the branches of the trees to tendril into the sky and kind of meld with it. The lit sky has the same kind of just barely constrained kinetic activity—a lot of it from color—that the branches do. Looking at branches with that much detail—I never wanted to paint that. But in this case I thought, “No, I have to.” I even went and looked at Schiele, especially his late landscapes, which have happier and healthier trees than his earlier ones, where the trees are often only a couple of teetering lines in the landscape that look like they’re about to collapse. In the later paintings he had patiently made those branches, using very little painting shorthand.
So I thought, “Okay, I have to try to do something using the reality of trees.” I wanted to make them feel brambly, but also graceful—something that you could get spun up in, and something the light would get trapped in. You can feel the light rise, but then the rest of the painting is also sort of coming up around you in a way that snares itself into the light, and then at the bottom everything becomes really dark. And there are some odd details in there, like abstractions of leaves and whatnot. So that piles up a bunch of weight at the bottom that lets the light move more aggressively away from it.
Rail: I’m looking forward to seeing it in person so I can begin to pick out all those details.
Gornik: You’ll see, some of it’s painted in quickly, wet-on-wet. I wanted just enough detail to emerge that you can start to imagine references to a darker world in the ground below. Anyway, the poem “Of Mere Being” started to come up for me towards the end of making that painting, and the title is his first line. Wallace Stevens created one of the great evocations of being in that poem. It’s shocking and total and the whole poem feels like a portal to accepting being. Also the rising and falling in that poem goes with the painting’s behavior. So you thought you knew something about what you were doing—maybe had a hint of purpose as you began the painting—but then you realize you’ll never completely know, because it’s just what it is.
Rail: “Mere being,” indeed. I think our conversation has led us to an observation the painter/critic Robert Berlind made in an essay on your drawings, that poetry is as useful a reference to understanding painting as theory or art history—an implicit response to early critics like those in Nova Scotia who forbade painting, calling representation “deadly,” whereas you animate it with light and breath. But just to cover the full range of your references, we should mention Specter Lights (2024), which alludes to music. You dedicate it to Neko Case.
Gornik: First, I have to send a little love and gratitude posthumously to Bob Berlind, who introduced me to Gaston Bachelard and gave me The Poetics of Space—one of the biggest gifts I’ve ever received—‚which gave me so much ammo for trying to understand how art, poetry, and my work “work.” Using poetry to explain poetry, as Poetics of Space does, is so brilliant. As I was painting Specter Lights, I got a Neko Case song called “A Widow’s Toast” stuck in my head, which has a kind of animal wildness that she always expresses in her music (and lyrics), and I relate to that. I mean, I principally listen to Johann Sebastian Bach more than anybody else, but sometimes you need rock-and-roll.