Were the life of David J. Pavlak — an artist who years ago made a name for himself painting horses but who more recently has channeled inspiration during the novel coronavirus pandemic into a series of striking paintings reflecting this time in our country — itself to be expressed in a painting, the work almost surely would be of the abstract variety, a piece with varying colors and lines moving in all directions.
“I have had a very unconventional work history in addition to being an artist,” the Elyria resident says.
Born in Munschweiler, Germany, because his father was stationed there while serving in the Army, his parents settled in Lorain County after returning from Europe.
He first displayed an artistic touch during visits to his grandmother in Pennsylvania.
“I used to spend summer vacations with her,” Pavlak says during a recent phone interview. “And while she was in school getting it ready for the next school year — cleaning, painting, washing windows — she would just give me a bunch of the art supplies that were in the school to keep me occupied.”
The creations he brought home were promising enough that his dad decided to sign him up for formal art instruction.
As an adult, like his father before him, Pavlak spent years working at U.S. Steel in Lorain and eventually was laid off by the company.
The younger Pavlak’s time with the company ended in 1982 — at least until he returned for a couple of years at the decade’s end — and he was in need of something else at the time.
That led to Pavlak falling back on his artistic talents.
Already having found a couple of galleries in New York City to show his work, Pavlak discovered another, this one in Lexington, Kentucky — horse country.
“When I drove down and dropped off my paintings, I saw that this was a gallery that specialized in horse paintings,” he recalls. “I thought I’d try my hand at that, and, well, one thing led to another.”
It sure did. Painting horses led to, among other opportunities, some of those pieces being shown in an issue of Sports Illustrated focused on harness racing, he says. Two works also appear “Racing in Art,” a book by British author John Fairley.
Again, he’d not thought about horse paintings until that trip south.
“I was doing mostly with landscapes, florals, wildlife, you know, but horses, no, that was never in the cards,” he says. “I fell into that ‘bass-ackwards,’ as they say.”
The horse connection went beyond art, in fact, He also obtained a trainer’s license for harness racing and raced horses at Northfield Park, and, in the 1990s, he bred horses at a horse farm in Wakeman and then in Lafayette, Ohio, east of Lima.
After that, and until last year, he worked as an embryo transfer technician at the Wellington Veterinary Clinic, but he also was very involved in the local art community.
Experience years ago with a satellite branch of the Lorain Arts Council in Elyria led to Pavlak and others in 2015 founding the Elyria Arts Council, for which he is the treasurer and interim board chair at the moment.
Not surprisingly, the pandemic has led to the cancelation of myriad classes offered by the organization, where Pavlak also teaches, some of which are transitioning to virtual offerings, he says.
It was a request by students that led to his series of pandemic-inspired works of the last year, “The Quarantine Paintings.”
“I started it originally as a little painting exercise, to see if I could do a portrait in a three-hour period — because that is how long my oil-painting classes were,” Pavlak says. “And because my students were kind of bugging me to do a portrait, a step-by-step portrait so they could see how I did it.”
After the shutdown in March 2020, he followed through on that.
And the very next night, I started the second one, and that was about three and a half hours. And then I did the third one, and by then the idea of a theme started to evolve.”
He started by painting subjects of everyday folks affected by the spread of COVID-19, from the healthcare workers on the front line to the kids forced to stay home from school, as well as folks he knew who recovered from the disease — and others who did not.
“And then it started to get a little bit of a political bent,” he says, referring to portraits of figures ranging from now-Vice President Kamala Harris, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to then-President Donald Trump, his senior advisor Stephen Miller and Fox News Channel host Sean Hannity. “I was just painting portraits of what was going on at the time, and, of course, you couldn’t escape the political climate in 2020. It was there in our face.”
His work on it is intermittent because of commissions and other commitments, but several pieces now comprise it.
“I will go back to it,” Pavlak says. “It’s a series that probably does not have a finish date — as long as the pandemic keeps going on.
“I keep coming up with ideas, so it’s an open-ended project.”
It has been really well-received, he says, and he’s sold a number of the pieces. He says he expects some will hang in the under-construction Central Branch of the Elyria Public Library System when it opens this year.
If the paintings seem just a little unusual, it could be their starting point, which is what has satisfied Pavlak from an artistic standpoint.
“What I enjoyed most about it was, first of all, is working on black canvas for the first time,” he says. “I never did it before, and I actually think now that I prefer to do a portrait on black canvas.
“I can visualize early in the painting where all the shadows and the highlights are supposed to be placed.”
That said, there’s not much in the way of pre-planning a work.
“None of them are pencil-drawn first — I’m just jumping right in there with my paintbrush,” he says. “It’s kind of been a learning tool for me, and also, I would say, it has helped me in my execution of these things.”
To see more of “The Quarantine Paintings,” visit bit.ly/fb-quarantinepaintings. Learn more about the Elyria Arts Council at elyriaartscouncil.org.
