Painting Without a net: Adam Grosowsky is on firm footing in the high-wire act of making a career of art

A DECADE AGO, before his career as an artist took off and while he was still waiting tables at the Zenon Cafe, Adam Grosowsky walked a high wire off Panic Point. That's not a metaphor. Grosowsky - a trim, explosively energetic man long fond of rock climbing - had begun practicing on a high wire after seeing someone do it years before at a climbers' camp in Yosemite National Park. On this particular day, though, he was at Smith Rock, the Central Oregon climbing mecca. He and two friends strung a cable 200 feet above the ground, spanning a 40-foot chasm between Panic Point - a cave high up a red rock spire called Monkey Face - and an adjacent cliff. After practicing repeatedly on belay - tied into a safety rope - Grosowsky set out across the void entirely on his own. No belay. No safety net. Nothing but adrenaline, concentration and his own grace and strength kept him from crashing to the rocks below.

"I only did it once without a belay," he says. "But I had to do it. I was determined to do it. Of all the things I've done in my life, that day is very important to me."

These days, Grosowsky is 40 years old and, presumably, at least somewhat wiser. His oil paintings - large, brooding, realistic images of lonely looking human figures, roughly reminiscent of Edward Hopper - have begun to sell well in Portland and Seattle, fetching up to $5,000 for a single canvas. A show of his recent work runs through Saturday at the Augen Gallery, 817 S.W. Second Ave., Portland.

Grosowsky has attacked art with the same single-minded determination that took him across the high wire that day. He paints day in and day out, producing 50, 60, 70 paintings a year even while working full time as a waiter - a job he held for 11 years - or, more recently, as a community college art teacher. His art career even soared - briefly - without a financial net. Buoyed by success, Grosowsky quit his restaurant job and lived for three giddy years entirely on the proceeds of gallery sales. He was, in those days, only as good as his last show, and he knew it.

"You walk into a gallery opening full of people, there's definitely no net there," he laughs. "You realize if there's no red dots (indicating sold paintings), you go back to waiting tables." But even high climbers want health insurance and a retirement plan, and two years ago Grosowsky took a full-time job teaching art at Lane Community College. At LCC, he inherited the mantle of Bruce Dean, a popular and respected teacher who had retired after three decades. That could have been a difficult situation for a younger man to step into, but so far Grosowsky has maintained perfect balance. He loves teaching. Students pack his classes. He says he's as proud of his teaching as he is of his painting. Meanwhile, he's turning out more canvases than ever before.

ON A RECENT morning, Grosowsky - wearing blue jeans, a red North Face pullover and a red baseball cap perched backward on his head - chided bleary-eyed students as they straggled in to his 8:30 a.m. intermediate drawing class. "I'll give you five minutes' grace period," he said. "But be in class by 8:35. If this was a job, you'd have to be here. Well, this is your job." Pacing around the room, Grosowsky warmed up the aspiring artists with a brief slide show of master drawings, about which he demanded the students take detailed notes. "You've got to take notes," he says. "I know it's a pain in the ass, but that's how you learn. Anyone know this artist? It's Albrecht Durer. D-U-R-E-R. This is Western representational drawing. Write that down: `Western representational drawing.'

`Anyone know who Plato was?'

Former students give Grosowsky high marks. Anne McGlade, a Eugene artist who won a juror's award at the Eugene Mayor's Art Show in 1998 and has exhibited locally, studied painting with him for a year and a half. A senior citizen who passes up the opportunity to give her exact age, McGlade was stunned on her first day of class when her teacher showed up barefoot. "He is different," she says. "Entirely different. He is young and strong and he is going to get places. He taught me to go for it. To keep pushing myself. To make it stronger and keep pushing and pushing and keep looking."

Born in Chicago, Grosowsky grew up in Carbondale, Ill., the son of two art educators. Noting his unruly intensity, a high school counselor steered him toward Evergreen State College in Washington, where he graduated in 1981. He went on to study printmaking at the University of Iowa; he got his master of fine arts degree there in 1986. Jeff Ellington, a friend since college who now lives in Bend, says Grosowsky astonishes him with his unparalleled discipline.

"He was absolutely driven from the day I met him, not just in painting but in rock climbing, wire-walking, virtually everything he ever did," Ellington said. "A lot of people who have talent waste it by not putting in the hard work. `Adam is inspirational in terms of what can be achieved through sheer desire and effort."

IT WAS NEAR the conclusion of his studies at Iowa that the young artist took an oil-painting class and abruptly changed direction, putting down his etching needles and taking up the painter's brush. "I didn't know anything about painting," he said. "I didn't know anything about color." His early paintings have unusual color combinations, especially yellows and greens, that border on nausea. Grosowsky's painting grows directly out of his printmaking background, and his canvases seem overwhelmed at times by fields of dark black, as though they're awash in printer's ink.

The paintings are inhabited by a variety of nudes and portraits, done roughly but realistically in strong color, and always with an overall feeling of brooding emotion. "I've learned a lot over the years, become a lot more controlled,' he says. `It's been such an evolution, although a lot of what happened in the beginning was good." Control, he says, has sometimes come at the expense of content, a battle he is still waging. His mother, he laughs, tells him his early work is better than his recent paintings. Grosowsky is impatient with the fractured -isms of contemporary art, dismissing much of the work seen nationally in the past decade as meaningless intellectualism. Instead, he has allied himself with a small but influential group of realist painters who have continued to work as though conceptual art and deconstructionism never happened. He admires traditional master painters from the Renaissance forward; most recently, he became fascinated by Jan Vermeer, copying a series of the Dutch master's paintings in his own darker style. To his surprise, the paintings quickly sold out at a Seattle gallery. "It's funny, you know,' he says, `the paintings I think are completely heartfelt, the painter's paintings, nobody buys. These sold instantly. `I think maybe these are too commercial. But art's a tough business, and a red dot is a red dot."

Grosowsky still climbs virtually every weekend and is well known at Smith Rock. In 1996, he helped coach a team of young climbers, based at the Crux Rock Gym in Eugene, who went to an international competition in Russia. On his office wall at Lane, among dozens of art postcards, hangs a strange souvenir of the day he walked the high wire off Panic Point. A commercial photographer happened to be at Smith Rock that day and caught a stunning image of Grosowsky in mid-walk; the photograph ended up in a full-page magazine advertisement for US Bank.

"Yeah, but does he have the guts to run his own business?" the caption says.

Grosowsky still broods over the fear and euphoria and elation he felt as he risked everything high off the ground. "Our generation didn't have a war to test itself," he says. "So maybe that's what this did for me. `In fact, I kind of want to go back and do it again."

Jan. 23, 2000