In life and art, Paul Villinski also explores flight. As a glider pilot, he sails the open sky. As an artist, he coaxes clouds of aluminum butterflies into a lyrical orbit. With a lifelong concern for environmental issues, Villinski repurposes discarded materials into art objects- beer and soda cans, vinyl records, musical instruments, shipping pallets- to surprising and poetic ends. He painstakingly and lovingly guides these mundane materials into flight.
"I want to take these humble, damaged, discarded things and find out what they are capable of -- what can be done with imagination, commitment, risk, labor -- with enough love. My work is an exploration of the possible, at the heart of which is hope."
Over the past thirty years, Paul Villinski has created a wide range of work that has engaged in theses as diverse as memory, childhood, addiction and recovery, flight, migration, and transformation. These topics have grown out of the artists quest for deep knowledge of himself in the world, which is indebted, in large part, to the experimental, colorful journeys described in the literature of the American Beats and counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Villinski's artwork- from his earliest mixed media experiments in art school to his symbolic paintings in his twenties and his hybrid paintings with sculpture in the early 1990s to his signature metaphoric installations- has always demonstrated an earnest, searching quality.
Villinski's work often mines early childhood experiences through the iconographic repetition and transformation of specific found materials and forms. Villinski has had a lifelong fascination with flight- whether physical, psychological or spiritual- as a means to unpack and work through his formative memories and experiences. Villinski says, "Artmaking is an act of revealing, an attempt to share human experience, to evoke what may be unexpressed, even inexpressible, but widely felt. At the same time, self-disclosure often equals self-discovery; in a sense, I work in order to find out what I feel and think, to discover what concerns me most."
Born in York, Maine in 1960, Villinski is the son of a longtime United States Air Force navigator, and was surrounded by planes and pilots, as well as arts and music from an early age. He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy, followed by the Massachusetts College of Art and the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Villinski moved to New York City in the early 1980s. Villinski is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant and has been an artist-in-residence at many prestigious institutions, including Wyoming's Ucross Foundation. His works hang in both private and public collections including The McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Miami International Airport, Florida; in addition he recently completed a major commissioned piece for the New York City Percent for Art Program, titled, "SkyCycles". Villinski currently lives with his partner, painter Amy Park, and their son in a studio in Long Island City and in the Catskills.