George Gordienko: An Introduction to the Man and his Art

George Gordienko was an artist and wrestler. Weighing around 260 pounds of solid muscle in his world-class wrestling prime, he could, at the same time, create the most delicate and mysterious Surrealist paintings. How this massive Canadian wrestler came to be such a gentle and whimsical artist and person is a life-long adventure worthy of a creation by Ernest Hemingway.

Born in 1928 of Ukrainian and Russian-Canadian parents in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by age 17 Gordienko had received numerous awards for his physical prowess. However, recognizing his adolescent penchant for art, his father gave him his first oil paints and brushes at age 12, a few years before he constructed his son's first weight-lifting equipment. But art always came before other activities, including wrestling, even at the height of his fame in the sport. He began wrestling professionally in Winnipeg and the United States, though he took time out to study art in the studio of Jose Maas in San Francisco. However, in 1950, being the good son of hardworking immigrants with ambitions for their growing family, Gordienko put aside his developing wrestling career to enter pre-med studies in the United States with the intention of becoming a family doctor. This ambition ended when, less than a year later, he was barred from that country because of a flimsy accusation of Communist ties. Disappointed, he returned to Canada to work in the logging industry in Sidney on Vancouver Island.

Two years later Gordienko accepted an invitation to return to wrestling. Between 1952 and his retirement in 1975 he fought in Canada, the Middle East, Japan, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and South America. At the same time he attended art schools in Winnipeg, London and Paris. In that decade he developed the habit of visiting the museums wherever he was competing in the ring. In the beginning his life as an art student and artist were largely unknown in the wrestling community, just as, as an art student, his classmates rarely knew that later in the day he would be flexing his muscles to intimidate his opponent in a wrestling match. His life was evenly divided between art, wrestling, and travels, studying and thinking in solitude.

Gordienko's early work displays a natural sense of colour, composition and craft as well as an uncanny ability to absorb lessons from art history. He was an artist who was not afraid to consciously absorb the lessons of early to mid-twentieth century European modernism. His training in London was probably traditional and academic; he could have established a reputation for himself as a portraiturist, a printmaker, a designer or a figure painter. However it might have been Anthony Caro, one of his English instructors, who encouraged Gordienko to abandon academic art. His later studies in Paris were probably more modernist and avant-garde, and it might be in that city that he discovered his penchant for biomorphic Surrealism with a touch of the late 1920s Synthetic Cubism of Picasso and Juan Gris. It is likely that Gordienko's natural pleasure in poetic titles for his paintings was nurtured by the prose-poetry that often accompanies Miro's work.

A brief discussion of a few of the paintings on display at Winchester Gallery in Oak Bay reveals the depth and complexity of Gordienko's imagination and artistic interests, which ranged from Greek mythology to philosophy to Cubist perspectives to Surrealist self-discovery to whimsical calligraphy and poetic titles. Most of the works in the exhibition are from the last decade of his life, and all these concerns were fully present in his mature paintings as much as they were three decades earlier, suggesting that Gordienko never ceased his search for a visual representation of the endless travels of his mind.

Inside Lucky Luke's Emporium for Fast Opening Wallets, 1998, would require the expertise of a psychoanalyst to fully elucidate its narrative. The painting, which can be described as a free-association black-line drawing floating against a cloudy grey ground, reads like a parable by Hieronymus Bosch fantasy set in a Surrealist non-place. Any one of the approximately fourteen animal-like or humanoid figures present in fantastical forms and guises could be Gordienko himself. However, the most clearly human figure is the small nude form gesturing upward from just left of the base of the painting. Is this the artist reaching for an understanding of meaning of his life? Or is he represented by the figure gazing across the canvas from the left - a bandage-wrapped self-portrait contemplating the vicissitudes of his career as a wrestler? Does the dog-like creature in the lower-left corner represent a childhood memory of innocence? Or is the whole composition a commentary on the violence and thrills of wrestling? The painting might be a humorous reference to either a friendship or event from the artist's former wrestling world. Or, very likely, the title is simply a whimsical chain of poetic sounds and images. Like most of Gordienko's mature works, the painting is produced with a technique of spontaneous but careful doodling of day-dreams that was common to the branch of Surrealism best represented in Europe by Juan Miro.

Quo Animo, 1997, a legalistic Latin phrase, which translates as The Intention or The Intent, might be a consolidation of the forces that seem to float in a state of chaos in Inside Lucky Luke's Emporium for Fast Opening Wallets. The four figures in this painting have been organized into something resembling a still-life group, a genre of art in which the artist traditionally has the most perfect control over subject. The calm determination of the large face on the left, which resembles a caricature by Saul Steinberg, coupled with the painting's title suggests that this work is a kind of manifesto, the artist's grim expression of his intention to gain control of his creativity. Like Inside Lucky Luke's Emporium for Fast Opening Wallets, this work is essentially a drawing, but here Gordienko has loosely brushed in several muted colours as if he is a child playing in a colouring-book, as if the colour is only decoration, and the real message is in the drawing.

In A Man Who Licks His Own Boot, 1997, line has been subsumed by colour against a nearly black background. This work reads like a diagram of a sculpture in which seemingly random objects connect in bizarre ways. For example, in the upper-center, a beautifully designed boot floats free in the air. Beneath it a chain hangs down to a typical old-fashioned telephone receiver/speaker. However the speaker is also a shower head, as indicated by the four lines of water drops that fall from it to a pink umbrella protecting a modernist clock standing on stick legs. Planted in front of the clock is a large foot that supports a whimsical human figure from which a tongue is extended to the toe of the boot.

The Arrival of Horace with His Magic Spade at the Ancient Site of Troy could be an illustration for one of the ancient Roman poet's writings, or a partial reference to his travels in the ancient Latin world. At the same time it could refer to any one of many single frames from several stage-like scenes in a number of movies by the Italian director Federico Fellini. The canvas reminds me of certain bizarre moments in Satyricon (1969) and Roma (1972), or the last moments of Amacord (1972) in which strange and wonderful human personalities and physical types are dancing on a beach in a timeless Italian dream. Like Fellini, Gordienko peoples this canvas with a whimsical commentary on the human condition; a ghost, a stick-figure, a Harlequin, a rocking horse or a Trojan Horse on a boat, a subtly erotic sculpture-like female figure ala Salvador Dali and a cartoon of an traditional African sculpture. The main figure, perhaps Horace himself, who observes the scene from the left side of the paintings, seems to be a creature dressed like a cowboy or farmer but with a horse's head. While there is no evidence of drawing under the oil paint surface, as in most of his work, Gordienko carefully designs the contents and compositions of this paintings. The painting could also be a reminder of the support that Gordienko received from his father, a man who, while poor, like Horace's father, devoted himself to his son's education.

Tragic Comedy, 1984, is rather different from the other words discussed here. Instead of formal or thematic references to Surrealism, this painting reveals Gordienko's uncanny abilities as a non-objective designer. While there are two or three reference to flying birds in this painting, its content is essentially pure abstraction, with reference to the visual language of Russian Constructivism as represented by the work of Wassily Kandinsky. Against a dark, undefined ground that is typical of Gordienko, a variety of clean, simple modernist shapes scatter across the picture plane. Depth of field and atmosphere is suggested by a cluster of geometric line figures on the right and a tall triangular architectural shape rising from the bottom.

When Gordienko retired in the heavyweight world-champion class in 1976 he settled in northern Italy with the beautiful Christina Tassou, a member of the Greek aristocracy whom he had met and fallen in love with in Athens sixteen years earlier. With her devoted support and practical influence he turned wholeheartedly to painting. Through her encouragement and connections he widely exhibited his art in solo and group venues in Italy, Paris and London. He exhibited alongside Pablo Picasso, Juan Miro, Henry Moore, Max Ernst, Hans Hartung and other European modernists, several of whom he knew personally. In the late 1970s, Bruno Bobak one of the leaders of the Canadian art community, whom Gordienko had met in London, organized two exhibitions of his paintings at the University of New Brunswick.

Gordienko lived with his marchesa until 1990. That year he returned to Canada and established his final home and studio for himself in Black Creek, a small, quiet community in the Comox Vallery of Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He continued to draw and paint there until his death in 2002.

Many Canadian artists have been influenced by Surrealism, though Gordienko absorbed its European flavor more directly than most. If anything, this gives him a unique position in Canadian art. While he always proudly represented Canada as a wrestler, when he finally came home as an elder artist it was to slip into an apparently self-imposed contemplative isolation. Considering the tradition of imaginary travels through psychic realms that pervades surrealist practice, coupled with his many years of global perambulations, it is natural to speculate that George Gordienko's art and imagination, as suggested by the final years of his endless creativity, never actually settled anywhere less than throughout the world - and beyond.

Brian Grison