Arvydas Kašauskas was born in 1959 in Vilnius. From 1977 to 1982, he studied fresco and mosaic at the Vilnius Academy of Arts.
“The quality of art remains a matter of the author’s ambition and integrity,” says Kašauskas. In simple terms, art is good when the artist cares and stays honest.
Kašauskas was trained in monumental art—a discipline focused on scale, structure, and permanence. This background still shapes his work today. He approaches painting not as simple depiction, but as construction: each piece is built, carrying a sense of weight and space.
After the fall of the Soviet regime, he began working independently, moving from public, state-commissioned frescoes to more intimate canvas works. While the scale changed, his material approach remained.
Paint is not just applied—it is scraped, pressed, and layered, creating dense, tactile surfaces. His work balances control with unpredictability.
Looking back, Kašauskas describes his early artistic drive as a search for “a brighter, more compelling life,” shaped by a time when art held a distinct cultural role.
Today, he sees creativity as something open to everyone—not limited to artists, but available to anyone shaping their life with intention.
Landscape remains a constant in his work. Often painting outdoors, he draws from the energy of place and shared creative experience. Even in abstraction, nature is still present—reduced to rhythm, form, and space.
For Kašauskas, every painting is, ultimately, an abstraction.
About this artwork+
In the painting, a leafless tree with intricate, twisting branches stands prominently in the foreground, its bare limbs sprawling dynamically against the canvas. The backdrop reveals a multi-colored hillside, rendered in patchwork-like textures of browns, purples, and reds, suggesting variations in terrain or vegetation. The scene is divided by a serene body of water, reflecting hues of blue and white, which hints at the sky's light and clouds mirrored on its surface. The foreground, at the water's edge, burgeons with hints of green, indicating grass or small plants starting to thrive, infusing a sense of life and growth into the scene. This mixture of vivid and muted colors alongside the sharp, fluid lines of the tree branches creates a vivid, yet somewhat melancholic, natural landscape.
