Artist and filmmaker Gus Fink’s stylistic mixture of the creepy and the cute doesn’t bring to mind meditation and mindfulness at first. Frequent figures in his paintings are Tim Burton characters, hollow-eyed skeletons, and Alice in Wonderland-esque cartoon interpretations of horror movie icons. But if you look closer, the way that Fink balances the kitsch of childhood with the macabre and the gothic requires an artist with his own sense of inner balance.
“My friends say everything about me’s pretty dark, but I’ve realized that everybody’s kinda both dark and light. People are afraid of showing their darkness or weirdness.”
Fink is an avid practitioner of meditation, which he says has brought him to a number of realizations about life an art, and he’s able to speak eloquently about his belief in metaphysical systems beyond the observable world. “One time, a visualization of Aleister Crowley came to me,” he said, recalling one experience—Crowley was a famous occultist known for founding his own religious order. “I started thinking ‘Isn’t he scary and bad and evil? Why is this showing up?’ But then, I looked up some of his quotes and he’d said a lot of identical things to stuff that I said. My friends say everything about me’s pretty dark, but I’ve realized that everybody’s kinda both dark and light. People are afraid of showing their darkness or weirdness.” Fink’s art celebrates that darkness and weirdness inside every person and is just one way that horror can help us learn to embrace our inner conflicts.
“As a kid, I was a total outcast,” he remembered. “There was no haven for me, so that drove me inward. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have experiences like that, because it drives you to the next step if you learn to take advantage of it. That’s another weird little lesson I’ve learned from meditation.”
Fink hails from Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, a region that once supplied coal all over America from the mines in its dense forests. Those woods are home to Centralia, where a coal-seam fire created a perpetual flame beneath the ground that still burns to this day and rendered the town uninhabitable. Fink’s hometown of Hazleton was the site of his own perpetual flame of creativity and drive. “As a kid, I was a total outcast,” he remembered. “There was no haven for me, so that drove me inward. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have experiences like that, because it drives you to the next step if you learn to take advantage of it. That’s another weird little lesson I’ve learned from meditation.” For Fink, growing up in a small town meant that seeing horror movies at the local theater were his first introduction to using your ideas and creative impulses to build another world. After a brief stint in Pittsburgh in his early 20s working at Iggle Video and attempting to repair some old childhood wounds, and then his first business endeavor, a “punk weirdo shop”, he drove his ’85 Plymouth Horizon back to Hazleton and said to himself: “I’m going to make it as a fucking artist.”
After a brief stint in Pittsburgh in his early 20s working at Iggle Video and attempting to repair some old childhood wounds, and then his first business endeavor, a “punk weirdo shop”, he drove his ’85 Plymouth Horizon back to Hazleton and said to himself: “I’m going to make it as a fucking artist.”
To understand the ethos of Fink’s work, you have to understand the freedom of the marketplace of ideas on the early internet. The Sotheby’s auction hall of independent creators of that time was eBay, where you could find basically anything and in turn sell basically anything, no matter how zany your work was. Fink handmade patches, pins, and other tchotchkes and sold them on eBay. “I would sit at diners and make some random little thing drawn on a sugar packet, then sell that! I just wanted to sell a painting for $35, $50, just small stuff like that,” he said. “I got there quickly enough, so I thought ‘what’s next?’ I always need momentum. If I get to the point I want to get to and just stay there, I get stuck.”
Take a look at Fink’s Instagram and you’ll see a 2023 reconstruction of that eBay marketplace—nearly all of Fink’s prints he auctions off to his audience in the comments of his posts. “It took me like, seven years, to figure out Instagram. I never try to use social media as a person. It’s this slot machine of stupid likes and comments, but when you understand how social media works, you can use it as a business.” As the social media ecosystem has shifted from Myspace and Friendster to Instagram and Facebook to now TikTok, Fink has found a way to adapt with it. “Kids on TikTok think I just make these crude little drawings and will comment like ‘your art sucks,’ and I just try to respond positively. It throws people off!” he said, laughing.
Fink is someone who’s undoubtedly made his living off his work and doesn’t focus on the philosophical minutiae of who’s a “real artist” and who isn’t or what the next trend is. He’s a stark example of someone who walks the walk of being a working artist. His down-to-earth attitude and openness to new ideas translate into his use of social media, where he simulates the DIY, open market feeling of eBay on the sometimes overwhelming medium of Instagram. But there are challenges to posting art that pushes the envelope on social networks that lean towards conformity and content moderation. “People love horror, but horror will also get you shadowbanned,” he said. “I like to use it to showcase my ideas, though, and no matter what the things that I make have a darker character that shows our vulnerability as people.”
One piece that highlights that aspect of Fink’s work is one featuring a grim reaper on a horse in the saturated color scheme of Lisa Frank. Fink’s handwriting proclaims: When they say you can’t be dark, dead, colorful, and lively all at once, make them eat their words with your beautiful darkrness. Other taglines are I like being weird with you or I thirst for evil, but coffee will do an I like being weird with you. Black cats and skeletons, “weird kid” horror movie, icons like Lydia Deetz or Freddy Krueger.
On his Instagram, Fink also shares his some of his wife Emi Boz’s pieces. Boz, who is also an artist, quit her job as a waitress to follow her dreams alongside her partner. Some of Boz’s works re-imagine classic paintings–In Boz’s re-interpretation of Klimt’s The Kiss, Edward Scissorhands gingerly touches his partner’s face with his sharp fingers. Or, in her version of American Gothic, Rockwell’s farmhouse couple are replaced by Jack and Sally from Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas. Fink’s art has also crossed over into the three-dimensional realm as merch and plushies—”Merch makes it so much more fun. It’s important to have that playfulness and make more cool things for people to engage with. I always think, you know, Avatar is one of the biggest movies in the world, but you don’t see Avatar merch. It’s something else for people to get.” One day, he imagines his creepy-cute cat characters maybe in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
”Merch makes it so much more fun. It’s important to have that playfulness and make more cool things for people to engage with. I always think, you know, Avatar is one of the biggest movies in the world, but you don’t see Avatar merch. It’s something else for people to get.”
These days, Fink’s biggest focus is shifting towards filmmaking. “I like to build worlds, and I love how films are a way to get something cool into people’s minds, make them leave a theater with that ‘wow’ feeling,” he said. “When you watch a movie with someone, it’s like you’re on an adventure with them. Recently, I saw Smile in theaters and there was a group of teen boys all with the same punk hairstyle. In the past, I would’ve shh’ed them, but it made me happy to see them there.” He wants to use film to reach small-town kids who might not find fine arts as accessible, because ultimately his goal is not to make the most highbrow work, but the most impactful and fun.
“I like to build worlds, and I love how films are a way to get something cool into people’s minds, make them leave a theater with that ‘wow’ feeling,” he said. “When you watch a movie with someone, it’s like you’re on an adventure with them. Recently, I saw Smile in theaters and there was a group of teen boys all with the same punk hairstyle. In the past, I would’ve shh’ed them, but it made me happy to see them there.”
His Instagram auctions are proof of that, selling pieces at affordable prices in a public forum and using social media not to show off but as a tool for connection. Most of Fink’s art pieces on Instagram start at $23, because the number 23 feels resonant and lucky to him—so 2023 is undoubtedly going to be Gus Fink’s year.
