Max Guarnaccia

Cocktails (after Rosemary Mahoney) Interior scene People Restaurant Texas Artist

2025

Artist Statement: As a painter I aspire to bring beautiful art objects into the world through the medium of paint. I am a self-taught oil painter and muralist who in recent years has largely focused on studying technique and traditional methods of representation. I am pursuing the cliché of “learning the rules in order to break them”. This pursuit has been greatly reinforced by my experiencing of representational art to be both inclusive and successful in its capacity to connect with an audience. Despite this fact, my work ultimately aims to graduate from a straight forward rendering of nature. I believe strongly that painting shines the brightest when the languages of abstraction and representation are employed together within a picture. There are of course a myriad of ways to achieve this aim, and the spectrum of possibilities is what currently inspires and grounds my painting practice. Max grew up in a suburb of Washington D.C. where walls are painted one of three colors: grey, brown or white. Growing up his narrow experience making visual art was relegated to drawing on the periphery of his school work. It was not until he moved to Richmond, Virginia at the age of 17 that he was exposed to graffiti, murals and a general culture of the arts. Drawing remained a compulsive habit for Max and in his early twenties he began translating those drawings onto walls with various types of paint, this became an obsession. For much of his twenties Max spent time traveling and painting walls across the United States and abroad. These experiences reinforced his love for painting and provided him with infinite canvas to explore different techniques and to express an increasing interest in depicting the world. Around 2019 Max took that creative momentum back inside and began studying oil painting techniques and traditional methods of representation. He now divides his time as a full time artist between a committed oil painting discipline and mural painting in the Houston area and beyond.