For Adam Grosowsky, the art of contrast transcends the canvas and defines the man
by LUCAS POLLOCK
photos by JOHN GIVOT & BRIANNE M. WILLS
On his birthday in 1989, Adam Grosowsky calmed himself as he checked the anchor one last time. From where he stood, a metal cable spanned tautly over a chasm, bolted into the rock 300 feet above the desert — a terrifying void to gape into, let alone walk across. During the years leading up to his birthday, Grosowsky aggressively practiced balancing the wire in preparation for what came next.
“If you wire walk and you look up there, you think, that’s the most perfect place to put a line,” he says. But few visitors to Oregon’s Smith Rock State Park would stare up at the rift and feel compelled to cross it by way of balancing along a narrow, metal cable. The crossing looms high overhead, a meandering river just to its west. The snow capped volcanoes of the Cascade Range line the horizon. Though just thirty feet across, the gap spans two vertical walls of rusted basalt — a wirewalker’s dream. “It’s this weird sort of esoteric thing. God knows why you do it,” says Grosowsky’s close friend Brooke Sandahl. He was present on the spire, known as Monkey Face, when Grosowsky first completed the crossing with a protective leash in 1986.
As the sun set on his thirtieth birthday in the late spring of 1989, Grosowsky experienced what he calls the defining moment of his life. It was warm, he remembers, and he felt ready as he put aside his protective harness and approached the edge of Monkey Face again.
In order to walk between these sets of bolts, the wire must be ratcheted down to the tautness of a guitar string to minimize play along its length. The line will still sway — but to a manageable extent, forcing the walker to counter the motion with a delicate combination of power and grace.
“Strength to weight ratio, he’s one of the strongest guys his size you’re ever going to meet,” says Sandahl, a rock climber known, like Grosowsky, for revolutionary ascents throughout his career. “He’s definitely in the upper ranks of climbing.” And at age forty-eight, Grosowsky maintains his top physical form and uncanny sense of balance.
Credited with originating the phenomenon of slack lining, which draws from the practice of performance wire walking, Grosowsky was one of the first individuals to place them, along with high wires, in dramatic locations around the United States. A slack line is commonly a piece of nylon webbing, one inch wide, strung and secured between two points. The challenge of balancing along its length is extreme. As the line flexes and swings from side to side, it creates the sort of mind-over-matter test of wits climbers like Grosowsky and Sandahl crave. This test has led Grosowsky to complete walks at the Lost Arrow Spire, several thousand feet above Yosemite Valley, and at Monkey Face in Smith Rock. But to the general public, Grosowsky’s reputation has grown over the past twenty years mainly because of his acclaimed large-format oil paintings.
Below: Grosowsky climbs “Tsunami,” a favorite route at Smith Rock.
On Monkey Face, among the settling shadows on that spring evening in 1989, Grosowsky could very well have been one of the subjects of his artwork. And his decision to balance the line unprotected that day represents a defining moment not only for him personally but also for the observer seeking to understand the scope and range of his body of work as an artist.
Grosowsky depicts solitary characters, dark and brooding. The compositions are lonely and romantic, as if the subjects are hiding in the shadows, wanting to emerge into the light. Contrast defines the oil-laden canvases, the effects of his dominant method: chiaroscuro. The play between dark and light engulfs the subject, pitting them at the mercy of the shadows’ mood.
In the style of masters like Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Grosowsky’s use of chiaroscuro accentuates the focus of his paintings, drawing the observers’ eyes toward certain expressions on the subject’s face or the directions of their gaze. The style dramatizes the works. A sense of longing lingers in the contrasting shades.
Grosowsky’s painting career has burgeoned in recent years. Through a steady stream of contract work for clients such as Nordstrom Inc., in addition to his gallery and private shows, he paints relentlessly. And for Grosowsky, this dedication spans his disparate passions of climbing, wire walking, and teaching.
A product of two artists, Grosowsky is climbing in his earliest memories. “As a tiny little kid, one of the first things I can remember is climbing the trees in the woods behind our house. We called them the back-backyard,” he says. “We had every tree in the back-backyard wired.” But he remembers there was one exception, a seventy-foot standout with no branches for the first forty feet and only a vine running down the trunk from the crown where the foliage began. Climbing to the top was the young Grosowsky’s obsession for weeks.
Below: Grosowsky steps off the Lost Arrow Spire 2,500 feet above the ground in Yosemite National Park. (Photo courtesy Adam Grosowsky).
“Each day, I’d shimmy up the vine, add four or five more moves, get scared, and climb down. The next day, I’d come back, add another four moves, and come back down. Eventually, I could link them all together and found myself just below the branches, so I just reached up and grabbed on,” he says. “Ever since then, I’ve always had an impulse to solo.”
As an adult, Grosowsky has regularly put himself in places of extreme danger, and he recalls these moments with nonchalance. He is known for climbing both vertical and overhanging routes alone, with no rope or protection. In the world of climbing, this controversial practice is called free soloing. All that is used to make an ascent are climbing shoes, a bag of gymnastic chalk to control sweat, and a great deal of mental and physical confidence. One mistake, slip, or loose hold means death. Yet his art, Grosowsky says, elicits the most tangible fears for him.
“Art and climbing are two very different parts of my life, but there’s more overlap than one might think. Making paintings can be terrifying. In the end, your success is determined by the tastes of other people, and that can create a tremendous amount of performance anxiety,” he says. “In a way, being alone in your little box of a studio with your work is a lot like soloing.”
