Music and fine art. The mediums of emotion. One operates in the aural realm, the other in the visual; both achieve the same result, and at their most exceptional execution each can transmute, sound spilling into vision, vision into music. If any guitarist can be spoken of as the Picasso of his generation, it is undoubtedly Gus G, whose work sounds at times more like the work of three guitarists, as opposed to a lone shredder with fingers that bring forth waterfalls. Thus it follows that Gus presents “Shadowlight”, a limited-edition beautiful art collection created in conjunction with creativity house SceneFour that anoints him in place alongside Yngwie Malmsteen, Scott Ian, Page Hamilton, and Joe Satriani as the newest member of an elite circle of axemen creating Guitar Art, a new medium in artwork built from guitar performance.
Gus’s career is an odyssey in three acts. In the first, he ascended swiftly to the rank of guitar god when a demo from his band Firewind created such a buzz that he was promptly enlisted by not one but three bands – Nightrage, Dream Evil, and Mystic Prophecy. In the second, his status was cast in amber as the guitarist for Ozzy Osbourne’s band, taking stages with Osbourne worldwide between 2009 and 2017 and contributing fretwork to the Expanded Edition of Ozzy’s 2010 album Scream. The third act, the backbone atop which this journey assumes form, is his deep discography with Firewind and as a solo artist, releasing I Am the Fire in 2014, Brand New Revolution the following year, and Fearless last year.
The concept of Guitar Art is wrought into reality by way of a special glove, crafted by the SceneFour team, that traces light along every stroke of Gus’s finger movements as he works the strings, all captured via a sophisticated process that begins with open shutter photography and ends with a limited series of utterly unique portraits of music in motion, blessed on canvas. The collection took a year from beginning to end to create. “Shadowlight” comprises nine different works – among them pieces like The Fire and the Fury, Dreamkeeper, The Demon Inside and Hands of Time – each numbered and signed, and available in highly limited edition sizes. Guitar Art represents a logical next step for SceneFour, the Los Angeles creative team whose rhythm-on-canvas collections featuring drummers like Chad Smith of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bill Ward of Black Sabbath, Rick Allen of Def Leppard, and Mickey Hart of Grateful Dead have showcased at galleries around the world. “Shadowlight” was officially unveiled to the public Thursday, March 28, and is available exclusively through SceneFour’s Guitar Art Gallery. Visit www.guitarartgallery.com for more details.
