Remembering Redmond Grybauskas

September 20, 1991-January 9, 2025

Category: Redmond’s Art

  • Redmond, the artist

    Redmond, the artist

    These are a few selected piece of art from Redmond that Janice was kind enough to share with me. We’ve been planning to continue adding more.

    Redmond was always making something and his work used all sorts of innovative materials– he had an incredible eye for diamonds in the rough. (Takes one to know one, I guess!). I remember him telling me about being holed up during COVID and not being able to go out to get materials– when Janice and I were talking about it, she showed me a few Marlboro cigarette packs that he’d used– with incredibly beautiful effect– as a kind of gold filigree.

  • “Is this thing on?” ingenious Fax Machine Art

    “Is this thing on?” ingenious Fax Machine Art

    Two works that Janice showed me of Redmond’s that I found to be absolutely gorgeous. If you look carefully in the 2nd panel you can see the figures in the upper left hand corner, and the streaks of messed up toner that almost seem like layers of wheatpasted posters on NYC sidewalk sheds.

    Apparently, Redmond found this fax machine somewhere (either a barn or on the street), and experimented by making collages to feed through it.

    I was just struck by the ingenuity of it– not only to rescue this object that we almost universally think of as useless, but then to basically ask, “Hey… is this thing on?”

    We’re in a time of a lot of nostalgia for old early digital era things– it’s tempting to say it’s because people are sick of contemporary technology but I suspect it’s just that we like anything that seems kind of old– but at this point, it’s like almost a cliché to bring a Canon Coolpix digital camera to a party. Chunky, pixelated VCR text.

    Child’s play!

    It’s not a contest, obviously, but… Redmond just always had a way of ahead of the curve