Eric Armusik claims to tear through the "modern art mumbo-jumbo" with a neo-Baroque aesthetic. In the middle of a long-awaited passion project, he finds his greatest ambition to be his greatest challenge.
Photos by Jacqueline Dormer
Originally appeared in the Pottsville Republican-Herald on December 13, 2020.
HAMBURG — Eric Armusik saw the embodiment of holiness at his son’s Boy Scout meeting.
When he spotted a bearded Iraq War veteran who had literally let his hair down, Armusik knew that he would be the perfect St. John the Baptist. Armusik immortalized the veteran’s likeness in a painting of the Baptism of Christ that now hangs in St. Mary’s Church in Hamburg. Jesus was from Philadelphia. Armusik turned the Schuylkill River into the Jordan, even wading in it in the middle of winter so he could see how light and fabric touched the water. It was this attention to detail and his sense of religious grandeur that set Armusik apart from the very beginning.
In 1995, as a Penn State graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in painting, one of Armusik’s professors told him he would never have a career painting the way he did. Twenty-five years later, Armusik has made a living, and has received extensive media attention, off of his highly unusual style. His work is inspired by the vivid colors, dramatic lighting, intense emotion and epic subject matter of the European Baroque masters, but with a uniquely modern twist (his painting of Helen of Troy features a young man with a Justin Bieber circa-2015 haircut).
“People thought I was crazy at the time,” said Armusik, 49, in his studio behind his Hamburg home. “I don’t think anyone thought it was a career path, but my persistence and my passion really kept me on it.”
Armusik said he hopes to cut through the “modern art mumbo-jumbo” and give viewers the same effect that the pilgrims and pious of the Old World had when they stood inside cathedrals and palaces. Since 2018, he has worked on the most audacious project of his career — a series of 40 large paintings depicting the events of Dante’s “Inferno.” He’s had the idea since the beginning of his art career, but finally has the experience and strength necessary to pull it off. So far he has completed 12, with the help of both Dante scholar Christopher Kleinheinz and Pottsville artist Marky Barto, who works as Armusik’s apprentice.
“I feel very honored to be involved in this epic project,” Barto said. “What makes Eric’s art unique is that it’s very traditional. In his body of work, he is preserving the style and techniques of the old masters, through traditional ways of work, historical accuracy, attention to detail, sincere care and quality.”
“I find it very interesting, the parallels of it, especially through my own career,” Armusik said about the 14th-century epic poem that tells of Dante’s journey to Hell and back. Armusik said that the hardships he endured early in his career were his own personal hell.
“It is the things that you learn when you’re in hell that benefit your life,” he said. “Some of the worst things that ever happened to me are some of the best things that ever happened because they taught me things.”
The hellish scenery of some of his “Inferno” paintings were partly inspired by the coalfields of his childhood home near Wilkes-Barre.
“Just black kind of piles,” he remembered, “kind of like faux mountains that we would play on as kids. I kind of saw this wasteland of inspiration.”
Both his grandfather and great-grandfather worked in the mines since childhood — the former died of black lung. On the other hand, the opulent churches he attended in childhood gave him his first exposure to fine art.
“It’s an interesting perspective growing up in an area with a lot of tradition,” he said. “Even though we didn’t have many museums in the region, every Sunday going to Mass to see the architecture, the sculpture, most especially the paintings on the walls, had a profound effect on me.”
After graduating from college, he studied in Italy, home of many of his artistic inspirations.
“Imagine living in a coal town and one day taking a trip over to Italy for a few months and seeing this enormous art in the Vatican, Florence, Venice,” he said. “I came home and just wanted to paint enormous things.”
After returning from Dante’s homeland, Armusik first read the “Inferno” and became immersed in the story.
While in Italy, Armusik also came face-to-face with the work of his idol Caravaggio, an Italian Baroque master who, in Armusik’s words, “painted saints with dirty feet.”
“He painted real people,” Armusik said. “These are not idealizations. These are real people that breathe.”
Armusik uses family, friends and Hamburg locals to portray the historical, religious and mythological figures that populate his paintings. Dante is his wife’s cousin, and Virgil, the Roman poet who accompanies Dante through hell, is a guy named Brad.
Armusik sees living in Hamburg with his family as the heaven at the end of all his hard work.
“When you’re young, you’re dealing with doubt,” he said. “You live in a world where a lot of people are like ‘Hey, just do what you’re supposed to and get a paycheck, don’t ruffle any feathers.’ I went through a lot of years where my only confidant was my wife.”
For over 20 years, he and his wife, Rebekah (a Gothic novelist and her husband’s muse), have transformed their ordinary Fourth Street home into a castle that is like a set from one of Rebekah’s novels and is as lush and extravagant as one of Armusik’s paintings. The “great room” is resplendent with his paintings, rich wood paneling and ornate furnishings with blood-red upholstery. One of the paintings is of his wife. Another is of the severed head of St. John the Baptist, featuring the same model he used for his painting of Charon, who ferries the souls of the dead into hell.
Armusik's portrait of Charon
“Even if there’s violent things in there,” Armusik said, “you can see the faith. There’s something very calm in his eyes and his gaze upwards. It’s not about cutting heads or any of that, but it’s about the gaze, that trust in faith.”
Armusik turned the home’s 1940s Formica kitchen into a palatial dining room with gilt candelabras and exquisite statuary. On the walls are Rembrandt copies and portraits of his three children, Nadija, 18, Milla, 16, and Alexei, 13. Alexei is an aspiring artist, and Nadija is his other apprentice. She has appeared in her father’s paintings as St. Veronica and Shakespeare’s Juliet.
“I really love working with my father because he’s so encouraging and I learn so much from him,” Nadija said. “I really love classical and religious art. I can spend hours looking at every detail.”
Completing the family are four rescue black cats — Mischa, Vlad, Viktor and Boris, who was lounging in the great room next to a miniature bust of Michelangelo’s David. Armusik is proud of his Slavic coal region heritage, and has the tastes of the Romanovs, who collected the finest European art to decorate their royal homes in Russia.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused Armusik to lose several major potential art sales, but commissions have continued. The pandemic hasn’t affected him much because he already works from home — sometimes for 20 hours per day.
“Everyone complains about Mondays,” he said. “I can’t wait for Mondays. Friday I’m like, ‘Ugh, it’s the last day of the week.’ I love what I do. If I didn’t have to sleep I wouldn’t, I’d do this all the time.”
When Dante first published “Inferno,” Italy was reeling from a plague outbreak. Rembrandt and Caravaggio painted works that dealt with epidemics. This year, Armusik coincidentally painted a portrait of Saint Sebastian, the patron saint of plagues, for a church in Akron, Ohio. It was the fourth painting of Sebastian that Armusik has done. All four have been self-portraits. Armusik likens himself to Sebastian, saying that despite the pain that they both endured, both survived the onslaught. For this latest painting of a more mature Armusik, he chose softer lighting.
“You’ll notice in all the work, there is a play on light and darkness,” he said. This interplay, known as chiaroscuro, is a hallmark of Baroque painting. “You’ll see the way light kind of dances around things. I’m always trying to show that inspiration, that hope and faith.”
He compared his painting to contemporary artist Damien Hirst’s take on the subject, a bull pierced with arrows and submerged in a formaldehyde solution.
“There’s nothing romantic about it,” Armusik said. “(My) artwork is taking people where art used to take them, and inspiring people to get through things like plagues.”
Another work Armusik reminisced about was his painting of Jason (of Argonauts fame) reflecting on his life before his ship comes crashing down on him. It reminded him of the Christmas season.
“It’s a reminder that we’re all human, and we all have a mortality,” he said. “That reminds me that you need to give those gifts to other people.”
Those gifts are not just presents under the tree, but the feeling you can get from a painting.
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