Photo: Charlie Rubin
There is an old saying about life that feels true to my relationship with painting: you don't know until you try. Every time I paint, I learn something new. The deeper I go into the medium, the more I realize there is no ceiling to what there is to know. That paradox is a gift. I am a painter because painting is a journey of mind, body, and soul, rooted in exploration rather than destination.
Central to Lankin's practice is an inventive and exploratory use of materials. Paint is applied using both traditional and nontraditional tools, including custom made implements and found objects, allowing surface, pressure, and movement to actively shape the painting. These methods foreground the physicality of painting, where each mark registers as a record of decision, action, and response.
His process remains open and adaptive, with paintings evolving through revision and chance. Alongside his abstractions, his representational works build from observation, imagination, and memory, resulting in alive images that feel both intimate and universal.
Lankin's practice is shaped by more than twenty-five years of studio work and a sustained engagement with art history, alongside over a decade working as a gallery guide at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. This long immersion has sharpened his attention to seeing, material evaluation, and the history of things. His life spent between dense urban environments and immersive natural settings continue to inform his sense of rhythm, space, patterns, and light.
His paintings engage the picture plane as an active field and a window into worlds. A combination he feels is essential to a good painting. Paint is treated as both substance and event, built, disrupted, and reworked through direct physical engagement. Each work develops according to its own internal logic, emphasizing responsiveness over preconception.
Lankin's work operates within a lineage of painters who approached painting as a mode of thinking through material, perception, and form. Resonances with artists such as Rembrandt, Philip Guston, and Claude Monet emerge not through quotation, but through shared concerns with surface tension, spatial stability, and emotional charge. Rather than referencing the past directly, his paintings extend these conversations through personal sensibility and inventiveness.
In a cultural landscape shaped by speed and image saturation, Lankin's work insists on attention, risk, and presence. His paintings unfold over time, offering space for reflection, dialogue, and embodied perception rather than resolve into fixed meaning.
Lankin’s work is held in public and private collections and has been shown across institutional, commercial, and public contexts. He lives and works between Manhattan, New York and Florianópolis, Brazil.
EDUCATION
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Graduated Cum Laude May 2003
B.A. degrees in Economics and Fine Arts with high honors
Journalism Program, May 2003
Faculty nominated Undergraduate Departmental Representative in Fine Arts
Silk Screen at Massachusetts College of Art 2001
Photography at Wellesley College 2002