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+
The painting exhibits a vibrant abstraction, its canvas dominated by wide, gestural strokes in a palette predominantly composed of grays and blacks that contrast starkly with vivid splashes of red, blue, and white. These colors break the monotony of the darker shades, adding a dynamic layer of depth and emotion. Some regions in the painting show more dense, heavy markings, suggesting the artist's varied application of paint, from thin layers to thickly applied impasto. This textural play imbues the scene with a tangible, almost tactile quality. Throughout, there is an underlying sense of chaos or turbulence, perhaps signifying a stormy seascape or a metaphorically tempestuous scenario, further emphasized by the occasional emergence of brighter colors slicing through the darkness like moments of clarity or bursts of intense feeling.
