Artist George Boorujy invited the Star to his studio at The Old American Can Factory in Gowanus. Photo: Jack Delaney
By JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com
As George Boorujy was painting his mural in the summer heat, groups of passersby would call out to him on their way to the soccer fields. Boorujy was covering the block-spanning wall across from a public pool in Red Hook with migratory birds, accompanied by tags for the countries they winter in, and the common complaint was that he was missing a name: “What about Jamaica?” someone would tease, while another pedestrian shouted “You don’t have Peru!”
It was hard work. In the end, it only took Boorujy fifteen days to finish the installation on Bay Street: six for the birds and plants, and nine for the solid colors of the background. “I banged those things out,” he’d say proudly, months later. But that sprint belied years of studying the subject matter and many hours spent scoping out the site, which the veteran artist described as “really weird,” and “a very difficult spot to conceptualize” because the retaining wall was low yet long — a daunting 963 feet.
The mural, sponsored by the Red Hook Conservancy as an addition to the Audubon Mural Project, took shape last June. But Boorujy still has fond memories of the commission, in part because of those exchanges with onlookers. If the piece was an homage to the eight bird species it depicts, it was also a statement about migration in general, or the “dichotomy of when you call more than one place home,” as Boorujy put it. “The birds that we think of as ‘our’ birds are not our birds. They’re also Panama’s birds, they’re Venezuela’s birds.” Many of the regulars who play soccer in the adjacent park are from Central and South America, he noted, and amid rising xenophobia, he wanted to acknowledge that parallel. “We welcome our birds every spring as they come in,” he said. “Yet we aren’t necessarily welcoming certain people.”
In a sense, the Red Hook mural expresses a dual interest — nature and migration — that has long been embedded in Boorujy’s art, and has just started to find a new form. Boorujy, who is based out of a studio in the Old American Can Factory in Gowanus, began drawing at an early age. And what he drew, growing up in a small New Jersey town, was animals. Everywhere he looked, he’d “always see the compromise with mankind,” like roadkill littering the highway, yet he initially shied away from portraying humans, even any evidence of them. “Sometimes an animal can function as a mirror better than a person,” he mused. He followed his love of wildlife by majoring in biology at the University of Miami, and eventually swung back towards painting.
Boorujy said the three stone figures in the center of this piece reminded him of himself, with his two sons. Photo: Jack Delaney
Now in his late forties, Boorujy has covered a lot of ground. “I’ve been making work about the environment forever, around 20 years,” he explained. “About climate change, and wildlife, and our relationship to [them].” For a spell, his trademark was rendering an animal, or several, in high fidelity against a massive white canvas, like a god emerging from the blank before the Big Bang. These paintings are extremely detailed — in one 44” by 88” portrait from 2019 of a panther suckling two cubs, it would be easy to miss a tiny mosquito clinging to her paw. Still, they’re not quite hyperrealism, because they’re too laden with symbolic weight. Therein lies Boorujy’s magic: his creatures are otherworldly, but they’re presented with such attention to detail that viewers are compelled to believe that this other world has weather, too, and life and death like ours.
During a visit to Boorujy’s studio this month, he showed off his latest paintings, which maintain that uncanny quality with a notable difference: the tabula rasa backgrounds are gone. Sweeping landscapes have rushed into the vacuums, articulating them with high-contrast rocks, trees, and lakes. In short, there’s a newfound emphasis on worldbuilding, a shift which Boorujy said was intentional. “If we cut carbon tomorrow, we’re still going to be living on a very changed planet,” he said. “And so I was like, Okay, what will it be?”
Though Boorujy’s recent work doesn’t offer definitive answers, each painting reveals a fresh and memorable corner of this hypothetical future. The landscapes are by turns bleak and serene. When his familiar animals show up, they’re altered: one image shows a zebra on its side at either dusk or dawn, its head out of sight — so that it reads more like terrain than living being — with a host of stone figurines sitting on its haunches. These statuettes, halfway between animate and inanimate, are everywhere in the studio. Boorujy sculpts them by hand, then uses them as models when he paints; that impression of a human’s touch is palpable. The overwhelming impression is that people were once here, in the frame, but they’ve since traveled elsewhere. What’s left behind is this makeshift collection of humanoid cairns and religious implements, personified and clamoring, to gesture at a broader story.
