Gregory Block - Donuts

Hi, I’m Gregory Block

I grew up the child of a couple of 90’s era crunchy-granola macrobiotic health nut parents who taught my sister and me to grind our own wheat to bake bread and would only on occasion allow us to add a teaspoon or so of sugar to our dry Grape Nuts. Once, when I was 10, my aunt snuck my sister and me each a bowl of Froot Loops, and the sugar rush nearly killed us. So donut culture was always a strange and mysterious phenomenon. 

It wasn’t til 2019, at the age of 33, that I finally began to appreciate the joys of the world of donuts. I’d been in a terrible cycling accident the year before that ravaged the right side of my body, and the recovery was slow. I found myself sitting on a stool, painting darker and more morose pieces by the day, and descending into a state of self-pity that clearly wasn’t good for either my own well-being or my artistic output. It was then that one day, I crutched into the kitchen to find that my housemates had left a fresh box of donuts on the kitchen table.  Not for me, but I couldn’t help but open it. 

It was dazzling, delightful, revolutionary! The colors, textures, shapes and smells. The way the light glittered off the powdered sugar, slid in and around the crevices of an apple fritter, the way the shadows even seemed to luxuriate in the richness of it all. I could have stood there forever, just looking, and after a few minutes, knew in my aching, broken bones that was exactly what I needed to do.  I would look at donuts, paint them, give each sprinkle and grain of sugar its due…and then, of course eat the lot. Maybe gain back some weight. You might say it was just what the doctor ordered.

And it proved 100% effective. The feel of my studio changed overnight, with music and color replacing the newscast and dark ochres. I felt stronger, began walking with greater sureness, and was soon skipping and jumping with donut-fueled abandon.  Which is about when the Pandemic hit.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one who needed donuts. People liked what I was doing, and much to my surprise, I didn’t tire of it. Indeed, to this day, that initial blast of inspiration hasn’t waned in the slightest.  Each donut is completely different from the rest, like a portrait or a landscape all its own, and it’s clear now that as a muse, they’ll never go stale. It’s endlessly compelling to see the reactions to the works—how certain people immediately gravitate to their favorite flavor, or in other cases, confide to me that they like the powdered jelly, but identify more as that old-fashioned in the corner because it’s a little rough and weird looking and it’s isolated from the rest. It’s been fascinating to see just how profound these conversations become, to be reminded that beauty is indeed more than glaze-deep.