Arkansas Art
George Dombek
Based in both Goshen, Arkansas and Brooklyn, New York, this painter combines his love for architecture and nature into a remarkable body of work


George Dombek remembers reading in Time magazine’s arts section in high school about artists like Jackson Pollack and Franz Kline, and decided he wanted to try painting for himself. He produced a few works that impressed friends and neighbors, and after graduation he went off to the Arkansas State Teachers College in Conway—now the University of Central Arkansas—with plans to major in commercial art. Dombek failed most of his classes and dropped out of school, but continued to paint. At the age of 25, he enrolled in the architecture program at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and earned a bachelor’s degree in the subject. But instead of continuing his education in architecture, he entered the school’s Masters of Fine Arts program, where he spent three years. This compilation of studies is easily noticed in both his early works and current pieces as well.

Although he won about 40 regional and national awards during his time in grad school, “reality set in after school, the fact that I would have to make a living,” says Dombek. He first traveled to New York City, where he was accepted by a gallery, and then across the country to San Francisco, where he was met with the same good fortune. “I was easily accepted by these galleries and their owners, but there’s a big difference between awards and acceptance and getting people to buy your paintings,” he says. But after that part of the equation occurred, “I finally kicked the habit of architecture.”

Today, Dombek splits his time between his home in Goshen, which he designed and built himself, and continues to work on, and a studio in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn in New York. Dombek first gained the New York opportunity through the Sharp Foundation, which provided him with a studio in Tribeca for a year. “This was just an unbelievable opportunity for me to not only meet other artists, but I was also able to meet some great people and patrons who own space in Dumbo, and I got a great deal for a studio there for at least the next few years,” says the artist. “And while New York isn’t necessarily the center of the art world, it is the center of the art market, and there are opportunities there are aren’t available anywhere else in the world.” If it weren’t for that, he says, he would only visit the city once a year to view art. “I love it here in Arkansas,” he says.

As for his current works, Dombek is drawing on past collections, including tobacco barns and objects in nature, from rocks to flowers. He’s already done series of barn paintings twice during his career, but notes that these, still, are different. “When you’re really interested in something, you almost do an investigation and spend lots of time on it, two or three years even,” he says. “Right now, I just want to do a bunch of stuff, and now I’m just doing things I want. I even did another concrete building, but only one,” he says of revisiting some of his earlier works of the backs of buildings in city alleyways. He and wife Sandy Twiggs even recently took a road trip of Arkansas backroads, taking a few days this past summer to travel the entire state looking at buildings that most people don’t really look at. “I’m not interested in the lovely barn in a pretty landscape, but the shanty behind it,” says Dombek.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Dombek’s work and his process is the way he can stick to the same subject but create such a range of paintings. “Someone once said an artist paints only one painting and just does it over and over again. The inspiration has always been the visual image, usually you see it and paint it, but sometimes you paint it and then see it,” Dombek says. “I’ll think there’s something there and I’m attracted to it but I don’t know why. But after painting it, I see something else, and the next painting will build on the previous, particularly in the rock paintings, you go from one extreme to the other, from ‘how complicated can I make this, or how simple can I make it?’”