Swerve

Karl Petrunak
April 26 - June 1, 2025

The title Swerve comes from Stephen Greenblatt's book “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern”. The book tells the story of a 15th-century papal emissary, Poggio Bracciolini. He travels from Italy to a German monastery to prevent a 1st-century BC manuscript by the Roman poet Lucretius, titled “On the Nature of Things”, from being lost or destroyed. According to Lucretius, atoms moving through the void are subject to a “clinamen” (an inclination or bias or swerve) that can change the atom’s direction of travel and, with it, its ultimate destination. Simply put, swerving provides free will to living things.

Making art has involved a lot of swerving over the years, except now, having adopted this idea in my approach to painting, the swerve brought me back to my earliest work; in fact, much, much earlier, 1975 to be exact. Fifty years ago, I exhibited a group of paintings in my first solo show. This work began with small drawings etched into the emulsion of 35mm color film. I then enlarged this image onto canvas using an analog photographic process that I developed. This inspired a course I co-wrote and taught in photographic processes and their use in painting for the Fine Arts Department at UCSB in 1973, the first such course to be offered there.

The paintings in Swerve at Left Field also explore scale using structures from the micro world that I have enlarged using a digital projector. I am fascinated with the sense of gesture and movement found on this scale. These forms/structures provide a matrix or scaffold for the layering of color.

Enlarging the sphere of the small onto a large-scale canvas has provided the arena in which I can transform, with paint, the forms and movement found there into the pictorial space in my paintings.  Working on a large scale invites the viewer into this space in a kinesthetic way. I hope the viewer becomes a participant in the performance that went into the making of these paintings and, in doing so, can get a sense of what it is like to “swerve”.

Karl Petrunak Bio 

Petrunak first became aware of painting as a sixth grader in Los Angeles. Fortunate to have an instructor who encouraged me to paint. In college, he studied painting with Peter Plagens and photography with Edwin Seivers. He received his MFA at UCSB while serving as a teaching assistant for Gary Brown. He served as an instructor of painting at the College of Creative Studies and Santa Barbara City College, a Visiting Artist for the fall 1977 semester at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an instructor of painting and design at Parsons School of Design from 1991- 2003. 

His paintings have been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows in Los Angeles and New York City. Petrunak is also included in L.A. Rising, SoCal Artists Before 1980 by Lyn Kienholz, published by the California/International Arts Foundation. 

Having returned to Santa Barbara County, Karl Petrunak has begun reflecting on his forty years as a visual artist with renewed energy. After learning to formulate his ideas as a practicing artist while attending UCSB for his MFA, Petrunak spent 30 years in New York City. There, he was exposed to many important artists and works of art, and forced to defend his philosophy as an artist at every turn. The competitive nature of the New York art world served to mature and strengthen his sensibilities as an artist, but over time, he felt stifled by the market-driven atmosphere. 

He now lives with his wife, artist Linda Daniels, in Santa Barbara County. Working from his Mission Hills Studio, his artistic practice is renewed. Pertrunak’s philosophy on art is that no matter the media, content must play a central role in the creative practice.