Greg “Pnut” Galinsky’s boundless creative energy keeps going.
And going. And going.
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Story — Jason Black
Images — Brandon Joseph Baker
Greg Galinsky is a total blur as he moves around his subterranean basement studio in San Francisco’s Lower Haight district. He’s gabbing on the phone, signing his “Pnut” moniker to a few small pieces and gesturing for me to grab a seat, all in one fluid motion. He can’t stand still, constantly swirling around his tight, dark, bomb shelter-like space as if he’s a possessed Energizer bunny with a Cheshire Cat smile stretched across his face.
Once my eyes adjust to the lone light bulb flickering in the ceiling, I’m not surprised to find artwork close by. Actually, it’s everywhere. There’s a large, square, muted blue and white canvas piece pinned up on the wall. It looks done, although he contends he’s still toying with it. Always adding to. Always subtracting from. There’s also a blood-red Cuba-inspired windowpane on another wall from a past exhibit, complete with Latin religious candles, an empty Rum bottle and plastic beads. There are pieces with tropical ocean motifs like wide-eyed tiki-heads, swaying palm trees and rolling ocean waves strewn about. And, lined up along the floor like soldiers, are stacks and stacks of more found windows. Each one offers up a different painted musical instrument: a trumpet, a drum and a guitar from a recent series he did.
Out in the warm sunlight of a rare clear-blue August day in the City, we stroll down the street to a café, grab a cup of coffee and dive headlong into the past.
“Skating is all about style and I’ve tried to bring that vibe into my work and into the art world,” he says while slurping his murk and sucking down heaters.
That’s not surprising when you consider that Galinsky was born in Santa Monica, California and raised in Venice by his Burmese mom and Lithuanian dad. At that time during the mid-’70s, it was ground zero for classic Dogtown and Z-Boys riders like Tony Alva, Stacey Peralta, Jay Adams and the rest of the Zephyr crew. Those guys, and their pioneering hardcore skate style, influenced him from day one.
“Growing up, we wore Levi’s, Vans and a crisp white t-shirt like it was a uniform,” he recalls. “That’s just what you wore.” It’s a look (and an aesthetic) he still swears by today.
Yet even before he joined up with the Dogtown gang to carve up empty kidney pools all over the Westside, his original inspiration to skate and create came from his parents. Early on, his dad shared his love of surfing, skating and photography while his mom shared her love of clothes thanks to a longtime career in high-end fashion. As he’s fond of saying: “Dad taught me about self-expression. Mom taught me about fashion.”
Then, at 6 years old, right around the time his dad picked out his first skateboard at the Zephr Skate Shop in Santa Monica, Galinsky started drawing. And drawing. And drawing. As he recalls, he didn’t really want to do anything else. Obviously, along the way, he was heavily influenced by the things he loved most in the world like skateboarding, surfing and living near the Pacific Ocean. Like his father, self-expression was certainly coursing through in his blood.
At 19, Galinsky entered Otis Parson School of Design to begin his formal artistic training. But he ended up leaving just three months later to pursue his dream of creating art and manufacturing his own signature clothing line.
After moving up to San Francisco in the early ’90s to focus on his craft and furthering his own creative endeavors, Galinsky launched Junkies, a streetwear collection he produced with WESTERN CIV’s Imani Lanier. Named after junk yards and junk collecting, not for William S. Burroughs-style heroin-chic drug addicts, the initial response to Junkies was positive and the orders poured in. Unfortunately, after a few successful seasons, it faltered. Speaking about cutting his teeth during that early part of his career, Galinsky has some fond memories: “I felt like this was a perfect place to live and work and be creative. There were so many talented people here in the City doing cool shit and I just wanted to be a part of it.”
In the aftermath of Junkies, Galinsky redoubled his efforts to develop his own fluid style of artwork, and he’s been churning out quality ever since. From skating, he learned to “always be practicing so you can develop your own style.” It’s what continually drives him forward.
And it shows. You can see Galinsky’s playful, energetic personality coming through in his work. Over the years, he’s mastered a number of different mediums including paintings on canvas, large-scale murals, product collaborations, textiles and applications on industrial design. But, strangely enough, his most unusual (and awesome) canvas to date was painting a Playboy playmate for a magazine editorial shoot. “Women have beautiful lines,” he contends with a sly glance.
Along the way, he’s collaborated with a host of quality action-sports brands that understand and appreciate his unique laid-back, skate-centric West Coast point-of-view, including Alva, Levi’s, Vans, O’Neill Surfboards, Stussy, Volcom, FTC Skateboards and Western Edition Skateboards. And he’s always stoked to work with everyone.
In addition to his ample surfing and skating roots that admittedly are “a huge inspiration” to him, Galinksy also draws on more established artistic movement touchstones in his work. They include mid-’50s Blue Note album cover artwork designed by artist Reid Miles (who was in turn influenced by the Bauhaus school of design) and the cubist master himself, Pablo Picasso, whose work taught him that you can always “paint outside the lines.”
And he often does exactly that, playing with the positive and negative elements of his creations like the back and forth surging for speed in a skate-able pool. You can clearly see this interplay of artistic styles throughout Galinsky’s work. When asked about his fascination with taking warm primary colors like blue and green and transforming them into his preferred muted palette of turquoise, aquamarine, teal, sea green, asparagus and pine, he responds, “Well, I love gazing out at the ocean and reproducing those distinctive colors in the studio,” he says. “Plus, I’m colorblind. Honestly, I can’t tell the difference between black, brown and blue.”
Craziness. But colorblind be damned, there’s no stopping Galinksy and his unabashed love of color theory. Next up for him are a bunch of shows: one a private installation alongside skate legend Steve Caballero here in the City, and another a hip-and-cool one-man show at The Camp in Costa Mesa, CA.
Ultimately, Galinksy remains humble and super grateful to be where he’s at, doing exactly what he loves most in life and making a real living doing it. What more could an old-school skate kid from Venice ask for?
“Always believe in yourself and never give up,” he says, blowing smoke rings while polishing off his java. “Just do what you love and the rest will come.”
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gregpnutgalinsky.com