Since 2021 · Detroit, Michigan
A studio that only makes sense next to water
Gus Design Studio started the way most honest things do — badly, and in a garage. The first canvases were painted flat on a concrete floor because there was no easel and no money for one. What survived from that period was the palette: black, white, and one blue.
The blue wasn't a decision so much as an observation. Living on the water, you learn that the lake is almost never blue. It is grey, it is brown, it is a flat sheet of nothing. And then for about eleven minutes a day, usually early, it turns a colour that no photograph has ever caught properly. That colour is the only one allowed into the work.
Everything else is subtraction. No warm tones, no ornament, no framing device. If a piece needs an explanation to hold together, it does not leave the studio.
Ford
Built in the factory
I’ve been building things as long as I can remember — an instinct shaped early on by my father, an engineer at Ford, and carried into my own career there, progressing from hands-on roles to leading major programs and proving how ideas become real. Away from that, I apply that same instinct to something entirely my own. Limited edition pieces built with intention.
The Room
One window, one light
The studio is a single room with a north window and a hard overhead light. Painting happens at night, when there is nothing to compare the work against except the work. Colour decisions get re-checked in daylight the next morning — and a surprising number of them get reversed.
The Source
Water is the whole subject
Three series run in parallel. Tidal is about the pause between movements. Nightwater is black on black, looking for the single break that makes the surface legible. Depths works in dilution — ink and water doing most of the drawing on their own.
Commissions open twice a year
Two commission windows, four pieces each. Tell me the room, the light and the wall, and I'll tell you honestly whether the work belongs there.
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