Canvas Detroit

BASK

10 28 Bask This may be hard to believe, but Czech-born artist Ales Hostomsky swears it’s true. If not for the lessons he learned in Detroit, a world away from the sun and sand of his St. Petersburg, Florida, home, there might be no BASK, the alias that has made him a self-taught talent known around the world. Careful eyes might even notice his raw, edgy imagery in the film Iron Man 3. BASK was commissioned to do a total of fourteen paintings for the film, including a re-creation of a 2004 piece entitled When It Rains, It Pours. The painting features a massive bomb crashing into the Morton Salt Girl. Wherever he goes and whenever he’s asked, BASK traces his creative roots and his subsequent rise to four pivotal years spent living in Detroit. In 2000, a fellow artist who happened to be from Detroit encouraged him to come for a visit. BASK tossed a painting in the back of his friend’s car and hit the highway. It was, he says, one of the smartest moves he ever made. “Creatively,” says BASK, who dropped out of high school, “Detroit was a total coming-of-age story for me.” His launch started practically the moment he arrived. He sold the only painting he had with him, and he was signed, almost immediately, as a represented artist by Detroit’s now-closed C-PoP Gallery. “It gave me the confidence to put myself out there in a big way. Some of the relationships and contacts I made up there are why I’m able to make my complete living today as an artist. Detroit just opened everything up for me, a huge building block for my art.” While BASK returns to Detroit at least once a year for gallery shows of his work, he’s left behind only two major pieces. The most recent is a giant monochromatic “D” covering an old shipping bay in Eastern Market and formed out of found objects. BASK’s most notable work in Detroit is an untitled mural just outside the city that looks, at first glance, to be an homage to scrubbing bubbles. “It can take on different interpretations depending on who’s looking at it and based on the fact that my name is up there and it’s a verb,” he says. The streets taught him how to see everything as a potential canvas. “I don’t remember the last time I painted on traditional canvas. It’s too pretty. I draw zero inspiration from it. Whatever 29 the street discards and finds no longer useful, that’s where I start.” BASK has found and lost himself painting on just about every kind of surface, from windows, parts of rooftops, wooden and metal fencing, tarps, and entire sides of buildings. BASK prefers found things. “I didn’t grow up on the streets of Detroit,” he says. “But my soul is definitely of the place. When I look at Detroit, all I see is potential. The city’s not hiding from anyone. It’s been through hell and back, but it’s still got this willingness to keep on struggling and surviving no matter what. I travel to a lot of cities that I love to visit, but I’ve never seen another city that comes close to capturing that raw inspiration.” For BASK, there is one other reason to love Detroit. Even to his surprise, his work always sells. “The city is broke economically and downtrodden, but I do a show up there and people come out and they support you. You have to see it to really understand it. In Florida I do a show and it’s a great party for the hip crowd. But in Detroit, the struggle to be creative means something different. It’s like art makes a difference to the city and they want you to know it.” “But it’s really very symbolic of what the city is in a constant struggle to do, to clean up the city, to put in the work to preserve things.” 30 (Photos: Sal Rodreguiz) 31 ...