Vertical Portraits: Grant William Thye
Vertical Gallery’s 13-Year Anniversary Show features 13 contemporary artists from across Chicago, across the U.S. and across the globe. But only one of these artists, Grant William Thye, can trace his relationship with the gallery back to its very first exhibition on April 6, 2013.
Grant’s dazzlingly geometric, cubist-inspired paintings and collages reinterpret the shapes, structures and forms synonymous with everyday life. He was born and raised in Iowa, where he attended Central College, a small liberal arts institution 40 miles southeast of Des Moines. “When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an architect. I'd come home from school, and I'd spend hours up in my room, drafting. Cartoons were always big in my world, too,” Grant says. “I took a lot of art classes in college, mostly printmaking and drawing, but I don't have an art degree. I wanted to do art, but it didn’t seem like a way to make a living.”
Grant instead spent close to a decade working a series of sales jobs, which led him everywhere from Cincinnati to Charlotte to San Francisco. ”I'd do good at a job until I figured it out, and then I'd get bored with it, and then I'd get a different job and go somewhere else,” he recalls. “Each time I moved, I'd get a two-bedroom apartment, and the second bedroom was gonna be my art studio. I'd set up my easel, and I'd put a blank canvas on it. When I got to the Bay Area, it finally hit me that the canvas I was putting on the easel was the exact same canvas I started with seven years earlier. In all that time, I’d never painted a thing. So I paid off all my student loans, got myself debt-free, quit my job and said ‘I'm gonna make a living as an oil painter.’ I had never in my life painted a picture with oil paint.”
Grant gave himself two years to achieve his goals, aggressively honing a flowing, dynamic aesthetic rooted in cubism — i.e., analyzing, breaking apart and reassembling subjects into abstracted forms viewed from multiple perspectives simultaneously.
“The first time I saw Picasso, it made perfect sense — just shapes and lines, and using your imagination. You could even say I was raised by a Cubist [Central College professor of art Larry Mills]. He taught the last art class that I ever took, and I was the only student,” Grant says. “My first day doing this full-time, I went down by the Pacific Ocean and just watched the waves roll in. Somewhere in my archives I still have these big, cool Conté crayon drawings of abstract waves coming in to shore. And I'm like ‘It's the same shape as the rolling hills of North Carolina, and the clouds that you see.’ There's a rhythm to the world — the way things move. And it can turn into whatever. Even now, making my own shapes is what’s most interesting to me.”
After a few months of trial and error, Grant launched an email newsletter to keep friends and family updated on his professional progress; recipients forwarded the newsletter to their own friends and families, and in short order he began receiving purchase inquiries from collectors throughout the country. Seeking a more affordable way of living, he relocated from San Francisco to Chicago in late 2007, making his first group show appearances the following year.
“By the time my two-year drop-dead date came around on May 12, 2009, I was selling enough work to pay rent, buy food and everything like that,” Grant says. “Then I did it the next month, and then the next month and the month after that. All these years later, I’m still doing it.”
Grant first encountered Vertical owner Patrick Hull during the gallery’s grand-opening group show ‘The Young and the Restless,’ curated by Chicago street art legend Dont Fret.
“When some gallery owners find out you’re an artist, they literally turn around and walk away. They won’t talk to you because they think you're going to ask them to look at your stuff, and they don't want to do that,” Grant explains. “But when Patrick learned I’m an artist, he said ‘Oh, really? Do you have a card?’ Two or three weeks later, I got a phone call: ‘Hey, this is Patrick at Vertical. I was looking at your website. I really like it. Do you care if we come over and do a studio visit?’ We talked for a little bit, he looked at stuff, and he said ‘We'd love to do something with you.’”
Patrick initially planned to feature Grant as one-third of a group exhibition concluding Vertical's first year of operations. When the two other artists dropped out, Grant stepped up. “I said to Patrick ‘I don't know if you know this, but I work in three different styles. How about if I do all three shows, and we call it “Three Sides to Every Story”?’ He goes ‘I like it.’ And I'm like ‘Oh shit, now I gotta do it.’ I worked 12 to 15 hours a day every day to get it all done.”
‘Three Sides to Every Story,’ which showcased Grant’s signature figurative abstractions alongside regionalist-influenced landscapes and cut-paper constructions, opened in March 2014. “What’s interesting about Vertical Gallery is that the shingle out front says ‘street art and urban contemporary,’ but it encompasses a lot more than just that,” Grant says. “Patrick loves the art that he shows, and he likes a vast variety of things. I’m not a street artist, but somehow my stuff fits in with his style.”
Twelve years on from ‘Three Sides to Every Story,’ Grant remains one of Vertical’s tentpole artists, headlining two subsequent solo exhibitions, 2019’s ‘Second Time Around’ and 2024’s ‘Release,’ and contributing to multiple group shows. For this year’s anniversary show, he and the other 12 featured artists were asked to deliver four original works sized at 12 x 12 in. (30 x 30 cm); Grant responded with a collection of animal portraits evoking Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar and other beloved children's books.
“I originally planned to paint the giraffe and the flamingo in a different format — tall and skinny. It was fun scrunching them and changing them around to fit into the square format,” Grant says. “Some might say ‘Well, that's not right,’ but why is it not right? You can do anything you want with your art, you know?”
Vertical’s 13-Year Anniversary Show is on display inside Jackson Junge Gallery, located at 1389 N. Milwaukee Ave. in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood through April 19. View the exhibition here.
