Gary Komarin (born 1951) is an American artist. Born in New York City, Komarin is the son of a Czech architect and Viennese writer. As with many noted artists of his generation he is indebted to the New York School, especially his mentor Philip Guston with whom he studied at Boston University. According to a New York Times article by Barry Schwabsky, “Guston's lesson in cultivating the unknown has clearly stuck with Mr. Komarin. And on a more superficial level, the teacher's peculiar sense of form can also still be traced in his former student's work – in the way Mr. Komarin's bulbous forms can seem to echo, in an abstract way, the cigars, cyclopean heads and naked light bulbs in Guston's paintings.” Komarin prefers non-art industrial canvas tarps and drop cloths as opposed to traditional painting media and materials. He builds layered surfaces with latex house paint mixed with spackle and water. The house paint offers hybrid colors that seem slightly ‘off’ and the spackle creates a beautiful matte surface. Kenneth Baker of the San Francisco Chronicle writes that “from these seemingly unlovely methods Komarin gets paintings that vibrate with historical memory, echoing such things as Matisse's driest most empty pictures, Robert Motherwell's spare abstractions of the 1970s, or the early New Mexico and Berkely paintings of Richard Diebenkorn.” Komarin's Cake paintings, which he has been painting since 1996 when he first showed them in New York, were written about by Sarah King for Art in America, who wrote, "Komarin's most successful works are serial such as Pop Art-like cake images, in which versions of a crudely outlined central image are repeated against a succession of subtle lyrical backgrounds." Barry Schwabsky also commented on Komarin's Cakes paintings: "Regarded thus in cognizance of abstraction, what's most important about Komarin's stacked motif, i.e. the Cakes, is the way it functions as an “armature” for the act of painting. Josef Albers didn't really have much to say about squares, but he appreciated them for the magic they allowed him to work with color. And as the title: Cake Stacked, Cornflower Blue on Creme, suggests, for Komarin too, color is entirely to the point! The ‘cake’ is a stable form, and the linear treatment of a legible image - along with the atmospheric treatment of the off white surround - allows for a different kind of balance between the painting's two colors than