Collage Sensibility

Martha’s Vineyard Times: March 2-8, 2000, “Intricate Art From Scattered Order” by Dawn Aberg

“I am scattered,” Anthony Guyther says, a little apologetically, showing the way into his home and work space.  It is a wonderland of quirky design and collage sensibility.  The presentation is overwhelming.  Framed pieces abound: on the walls, stacked neatly on the floors, covered in heaps in corners.  Small antiques and collectibles grace every available surface, along with work Guyther sells to tourists in the summer.  The viewer is not sure whether some pieces are art or a happenstance of interior decoration.  On the seat of one chair, for instance, is an arrangement of small dried crabs within a huge complete jaw of a shark.  Teeth and all. “If the shark doesn’t get you, the crabs will,” he says.  Perhaps the artist states the title of a work in progress.  Or perhaps he simply offers a bit of advice about seating arrangements.

What soon becomes clear, however, is that Guyther’s self-description as “scattered” is more than a little disingenuous.  In fact, one begins to suspect a clever ruse put forth to test the visitor’s powers of observation and understanding. There is order here, a wild, baroque order, but order nonetheless. Guyther is clearly an artist who knows very well what he is about, an artist with a strong sense of design and compositition, and more than a few direct links to the collective unconscious.

Guyther has led a remarkable life, and has had a correspondingly remarkable career.  Born in Cuba, where his father worked for the United Fruit Company, he grew up all over New York City — the Village, the Upper East Side. He attended public school in Brooklyn before going on for a brief time to art school at the Art Students League.  He only lasted a few months, disenchanted with teachers who tried to force him in directions that ran counter to his natural talent.  “Those that can, do. Those that can’t, teach,” he states firmly. “Picasso was not an art teacher.”

To support himself in New York, Guyther did magazine layouts and worked in advertising.  Eventually he moved into photography, doing album covers for Decca/Coral records. (Della Reese, Steve Allen, and Lawrence Welk are only a few of the musicians to have albums graced by Guyther’s work.)  A handsome black and white photo in his studio shows a store window display at night of work he did in the 1950’s for Bonwit Teller. He was the art director for Theater Arts Magazine during its run in the ’60’s.  On a parallel track, Guyther worked with antique dealers and eventually became involved in the antiques business himself. Lucky for us, amidst all these activities, he began to work with collage in 1970, work he continues to this day.

Guyther’s art has been described as symbolist, an artistic genre distinctly different from surrealism.  The images he produces play games with the mind by toying with symbols, not by contorting visions of reality.  The interest of the work lies not simply in its cleverness.  There is also a beauty in the design perceptions with which he organizes a piece, so that the work stands on its own as a work of art.  These are not merely amusing decorative arrangments.

In composing one of his pieces, Guyther starts with a copy of a black and white engraving, usually of a human figure, which he has gleaned from his collection of old books.  He keeps these engravings, along with images of birds, hands, mollusks, flowers, insects, and anything else you can imagine, in alphabetized files that he raids as the insipration comes to him.

Once he has chosen the human figure he wants to work with, he adds things that seem right, that seem to fit: different shapes and sizes of things.  “Different things go together,” he says off-handedly, although in his work and mind they go together in some amazing ways. Over the finished composite image, Guyther adds a watercolor wash to excellent effect. He then mounts the image, using old frames (“they are better and cheaper,” he says) and mattes he has made himself using sponge painting techniques.

In most instances, Guyther says he has no preconceived notion of directions the work might take. Only when the work is finished does he title it, usually with one of the puns he favors. Pigs Tie (pig sty) is a picture of a pig in a tie.  Fish Scales, one of his best sellers, is a person playing music on a keyboard imbedded in a large fish belly.  There is also Bass Player in which a fish (a bass… get it?) is played like an upright string bass.  The word games roll out endlessly out: Key of Sea, Tuba Toothpaste.  Despite his almost dismissive attitude about some of his most popular Island pieces — what he refers to as the beach, shells, and fish stuff — the work is clever, combining words and images in wonderfully quirky ways.

In addition to his two-dimensional images, Guyther works in a medium he calls assemblage, a form of sculptural collage. The different versions of his piece entitled L’Homme Cent/Sans Tetes are good examples of this assemblage work.  In L’Homme, the work is a punny description of a headless man covered with one hundred pictures of heads.  Reflective of his practical bent, he also creates little trucs for sale: post cards of his work, intricate little matchboxes covered with shells and sand and other minute maritime things. As noted earlier, he inhabits a wonderland.

Beyond his best-selling Island, sea, and music themes, Guyther accomplishes his most interesting work. It is not the sort of art that appeals to tourists.  His more complex images are psychologically dark and erotic (though not graphic) in nature.  Here, a more sophisticated viewer can see Guyther’s rare talent come to the fore.  In these pieces, with his idiosyncratic techniques of assembly and combination, he is able to create startlingly effective allusions to deeply textured human themes. 

Guyther’s presentation of these themes, worked into the oddly formal and skewed juxtapositions of antique illustration, delicately and subtly colored in pale greens and reds, moves deep into the viewer’s imagination.

His most recent work is particularly striking.  Two pieces completed since the beginning of the year stand out as exceptional. In Poseidon Bound, it’s the pale green ocean god confined in the grip of conflict instead of the mythically standard Prometheus.  In Night Owls, a bird-headed female figure commands the center of the midnight image, surrounded by nocturnal consorts.  As evidenced by these pieces, Guyther moves his technique in insistently interesting artistic directions. There is a depth to this work byond the obvious rational references.

Guyther’s work is shown summers at the Chicamoo Gallery and the Shaw Cramer Gallery, and year-round at the Marth’sVineyard Women’s Coop.  You might catch the artist himself some days at the Tisbury Council on Aging, where he is a member of the executive board), or on beach walks in Vineyard Haven. But however you accomplish it, take some time to explore the “scattered” world of Anthony Guyther. You will be astounded by the discoveries you make.