Josh Garrick's life journey

There’s a five-ton stone suspended 50 perilous feet in the air as Josh Garrick stares through a lens at an ancient homage to the gods in mid-resurrection. The sun crossing from his left touches off flits of light and shadow as it cascades around Greek columns of stone and beams toward the horizon. Click.

It’s seemingly just a photograph, albeit a good one. The contrast captured in brilliant sun etches details in your mind as starkly as weathered marble. But the angle’s a bit off. Nobody’s ever seen Athens’ Acropolis quite like this. That’s when you notice it. He’s standing on top of the Parthenon.

“That was the happiest time in my life,” Garrick said. It was a rare glimpse that started with a snapshot and launched a photo-artistic exhibition that’s now a part of four galleries throughout Central Florida.

Though “Monumental Monochromes” debuted May 23 at the Lake Eustis Museum of Art, it began with a moment on the far side of the globe.

Globetrotter of Greece

It’s an obsession that began early in Garrick’s life and would come to define a career that’s taken him to New York City, Europe, Hong Kong and back again. Artistic sympathies may have made him a citizen of the world, but he always called one place home — an atypical artistic mecca a bit southeast of cliché.

“Paris is not my city,” Garrick said. “Athens is my city.”

Ask him about a Greek ruin — the Parthenon, for example — and he can make you think it was human for all the life it’s lived. He’s bridged that gap himself, making his body a fitting tribute to the past. There’s a tattoo on his right arm — a line of Spartan Warriors, notoriously the toughest of Greece.

“Nobody goes to Sparta,” he said. But Garrick has.

The teacher, author and arts columnist touched the stone of Greek antiquity and made friends with the men resurrecting it as he’s composed a career out of his brief audiences with monuments to the gods.

Two decades ago Garrick was a budding art student with a passion for the latter Bronze Age and for a people who spent centuries building temples that would survive antiquity to define cultures for millennia.

It also came to define his work, his art and his gallery of a home, wrought of sculpture and an eclectic mix of old and new that always seems anchored in the land of Zeus and Athena.

It would take him to Columbia University to earn a Master’s of Fine Art degree. He left that for New York’s School of Visual Arts, which didn’t care about his degree at all.

Birth of an artist

It started with a question: “Why don’t you like abstract art?”

School of Visual Arts founder Silas Rhodes, who would grow to be Garrick’s friend and mentor, was prying a bit. But he had a point to make to the young artist as he stared at a painting in front of him.

“What I want you to do is to allow this painting to wash over you like you were walking into the ocean,” he said.

Until that moment, Garrick said, he had been an analyst. He knew art in academia. He didn’t know art.

“Columbia taught me how to be a writer and a researcher,” he said. “Teaching at the School of Visual Arts taught me to be an artist.”

It also taught him to appreciate life, as he traveled the world, recruiting art students in far-flung corners of the globe. He spent mornings on water taxis in Hong Kong, watching the sun turn buildings into shimmering metal.

But if it weren’t for the challenges he faced, he might not appreciate those happy moments, he said.

Fight of his life

Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor” dances precariously across Garrick’s living room as an outstretched arm of Tropical Storm Beryl approaches from the east toward his living room window.

It’s a stormy Memorial Day at home for Garrick, as he waits for a pair of patrons to pick up their print. He relaxes at a small kitchen table as a pair of disjointed eyes stare back at him from the wall. The occasional haunting image comes alive along the walls of Garrick’s home gallery, but most are happy memories.

Point to a painting and he can tell you the story of the artist who created it, and of the moment he brought it home.

Then there are the memories he’d prefer to forget if they hadn’t defined him. Stricken not once but twice by cancer, he’s turned to art to see the beauty in tragedy.

On a black bookshelf in his library hang two bronze masks, the iconic smile and pained sadness born of Greek expression now etched in eternity. On the floor in front of that shelf, photographs wait, some for a show, others for a frame. Many wouldn’t be there if fate hadn’t intervened.

“If I didn’t move from New York I wouldn’t be alive today,” he said.

He slips off his shoe and shows off the scars along the bottom of his left foot, part of which was removed when he was diagnosed with melanoma.

“Doctors in New York never check your whole body,” he said. “Only in Florida do they know to look down there.”

His doctor asked him, “How many people do you know who put sunblock on their feet?”

Six years ago cancer struck again, this time attacking from the inside out.

An experimental surgery in the Bahamas was supposed to remove it all, Garrick said. It failed. The cancer returned. Once again, he had to come to grips with his own mortality, and his outlook on life.

“We have to get past the useless negative energy,” Garrick said. “Because some of us might not have the time.”

Pressing on with treatment, he endured grueling radiation therapy to try to finish off the cancer. And slowly it started working.

A personal resurrection

Six years later, he was standing at his exhibition’s opening, a tearful hello beyond the precipice of goodbye. “Monumental Monochromes” brought together a collection of towering photographic pieces rendered on aluminum sheet as a testament to the historic enormity of the subject matter.

At the Lake Eustis gallery, friends and art lovers gathered to pay tribute to a man who had survived cancer while transforming himself as an artist who, once again, had his moment in the limelight. It had been exactly one year since he was declared cancer free.

And then his same friends and fans bought four pieces and donated them to local galleries to be part of their permanent collections. Among them, Garrick’s friends the Kassianides family of Longwood donated one of his photos of the Parthenon to the Maitland Art Center.

“I have never in my life heard of one exhibit leading to four pieces going to museums’ permanent collections,” Garrick said.

Though his work is drawing growing acclaim at home, something else calls to him on the other side of the globe. He’s going back, he said. There’s still much more to do.

“I don’t know if they’ll finish the reconstruction in my lifetime,” Garrick said of the Greek ruins. But he’ll be there to document it for the world. It’s a mission, he said.

“It’s an intensely personal experience,” he said. “I truly feel like it’s my destiny.”