Upon entering Sebastian Thomas Gallery, a shot-gun style space with a partial glass block wall towards the back, David Frutko calls out, “Hello!” Frutko, a Baltimore-native who once painted a series of venereal diseases in abstract, is a walking canvas. He stood speckled in paint before a flat, rotating easel, layering coarse pumice stone onto a canvas.
“I feel like I’m icing a cake,” Frutko said, chuckling. “I love layers, for me it is about color, texture and depth.” He uses three different forms of pumice stone for texture, including coarse, extra coarse and fine.
Frutko is the owner of Sebastian Thomas Gallery, a fixture on the 600 block for over three years. He said the first thing he did when he arrived in the ‘Burg was to hang his paintings on the wall at home. The second was searching for a space to do art. He began working at the CakeWalk Artists’ Co-Op, which no longer exists. The space was too small for him, so he searched for something else.
“I was riding down Central Ave. and saw a sign hanging down here and they were renting the entire block. I was one of the original artists here.” He credits Leslie Curran of City Council for the ideation and execution of the vision for the 600 block, as well as Thomas Gaffney, a Tierra Verde investor.
“St. Pete is conducive for artists because it’s cheap space. Artists need cheap space and a place to create,” Frutko said. He says we need three things in life and that the ‘Burg offers all three: Friends, Freedom and the Freedom to Think.
Frutko was a New Yorker before he became a ‘Burger. He owned an advertising agency in the Big Apple and the balance between his job and his art was off-kilter.
“For me, I’ve always had 3 criteria for liking a job. 1. Environment in which I worked 2. Compensation 3. Type of work that I did. I could live with two, and I couldn’t live with one. It was always one thing, when I wanted to go on vacation it was compensation, sometimes it was the environment in which I worked. But who wants to work in a hell hole?” Frutko said.
When he had time, Frutko would visit one of the many art studios New York has to offer. He said many studios would have open studio nights and for $2 or $3 he could attend “gestures,” short sessions for sketching nude models, which he claims as his first love. Lately, he’s been working on something with a little more “bang.”
“I love to work in series,” he said. His current project for which he was “icing” canvases is a 10 panel series called Big Bang Theory, all of which will be works 36×48 in size. He also works in dips, trips and quads, which are two, three and four panel pieces, respectively. He doesn’t always choose canvases of the same size.
“I have series lined up in my head, whether I have a dream, see something in the newspaper, run into somebody or even walk down the street and see something ugly,” Frutko said.
“But I’m the optimist. I fill my life with color. Why fill your environment, your nest, with another horror?”
If the piece he’s working on doesn’t quite “get there,” he keeps trying for a while and then tosses it aside. He has a pile of rejects leaning against an easel in his studio and calls it the “didn’t-quite-make-it” pile.
“Artists need to develop self and become their own critic.” He said his advice to other artists is that they can’t let others’ opinions influence their work.
When he isn’t at his gallery, Frutko likes to read. He says he had read every Pulitzer Prize winning book for the last 50 years. “I do that so I don’t get stuck with Jackie Collins,” he said laughing.
Frutko digs living in the ‘Burg. “It’s familial, and that’s important in this world.”
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Sebastian Thomas Gallery is located at 635 Central Ave. and is open Wednesday-Saturday, 11am-5pm.
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