Cormac Ganshirt began drawing at a young age when he was bored in class to pass the time but was always intimidated by his older sister who’s artwork he saw as the end all be all of art. As more time went by a greater sense of disinterest filled him and he pursued his artwork.
“All the other kids would sit there and do nothing and I’d be like: I’m going to draw a house because that’s tight”
Recollecting the story of why he started drawing, Ganshirt chuckled because he’s almost positive he did to his sister what she did to him and, when he started taking art seriously, she stopped drawing. Ganshirt didn’t do much art until freshman year and proceeded to take an art class for a week and the only thing he learned was to draw a circle with a shadow under it and all. It was in the margins of his papers for the next month.
“I got really interested how shadows worked with a simple gradient and the effects it has on art in a sense it made the art alive”.
To Ganshirt art enjoyed art in a physical sense that his talents looked so beautiful on paper but as he’s grown up it’s become more of an emotional outlet for him. He pondered the question of what art was to him and took a minute or two thinking about how he wanted to dictate the complicated emotions he has with this life-long passion.
“It’s a tool for expression, the same way that writing is. I have a lot of stuff in my head that I want to get out on paper. When I was a kid I thought knights were really cool so I’d convey that emotion with a drawing of a knight. There’s something extremely appealing to making your own world, that’s what I mainly do”.
Ganshirt gets most of his joy out of the process and final product when working on a piece, the process of making something and improving it over and over again until it’s something he thinks is worthy.
“There’s some click where it’s like: It’s up there (the brain) now it’s there (on paper) and now I can share it with other people.”
He enjoys sharing his message and seeing how it is received by the viewer of his art and how his emotions are translated to others viewing his work.
“It’s cool to open up a conversation because if you’re trying to get an emotion across it’s interesting to me to see if that worked and what went wrong”
Ganshirt has countless artworks from huge projects to minor sketch journals which some of his favorites include a series of sketchbooks of his scribbles and some more refined art and he enjoys it because it’s entirely for himself as he doesn’t show the books to others
“The sketchbooks are where I flesh out ideas, I remember I was doing a sketch for Ms. Shea and I had this idea to draw this guy and researched different designs for shirts and boots and drew boot after boot on the pages to try to get this idea correct”.
Ganshirt doesn’t do a lot of traditional research for his art and relies on his visual library and observes the composition of objects. He carefully crafted how he put his thoughts about composition. Ganshirt noted that he observes how objects are put together and how light reacts with them. He cares greatly about scene composition and how objects interact with each other to make a picture to tell a story.
“As a kid, I always tried to observe as much as possible and take mental notes of how things are composed, setup, and how they work. When I was trying to figure out how shadows work, I’d sit around in class and just watch how shadows work with different objects and angles.”
Art came from a place where Ganshirt struggled with school at least in the beginning where he didn’t do well in early schooling and his grades were awful as an elementary student and he mainly messed around and drew
“I grew into the academic role, but I’ve still only sat through maybe 7-10 classes without drawing in an academic year. Most of my drawings are in my notebook margins and I’d have monthly drawings in different classes like one year I had a history piece where I drew a street with a tram and a deco building, but as I’ve gotten older I just draw what I want in whatever class”
He is now a high school senior and Ganshirt is a celebrated artist, locally to nationally. He’s won, two, state gold keys for scholastic art and writing awards, one national silver medal for scholastic art and writing awards, and Best in Category for the Mass Congressional Art Show for Drawing and Illustration. He’s been commissioned to create murals and he has another slated for the South East School of Music.
“Art’s like, a visual vibe check”.