My name is Paul Kostabi and I am an American artist. I was born in Whittier, California.

I am mostly a painter, but I also do sculptures and prints and multiples. I've been starting to work a lot with glass sculpture and corten steel, and various other materials. I live in New York and I have two studios  - I primarily work out of the East Village in New York City and I have a much larger studio in Rockland County in the city of Orangeburg.

I've been making and creating art for most of my life. I've been routinely exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the world since 1984.

Over the years I've been asked why I make art. It's such a difficult answer to come up with. I simply have to say, “because I can”.

Sometimes I think of painting as seasonal. Like the four seasons. I have four distinct styles, but they sort of all overlap and become one. I do, not unlike many artists and great masters, paint faces, flowers, and abstracts and then I have an iconic character called SPRKL.

My faces are primarily figurative expressionism, and my flower paintings are also figurative expressionism because they express the flowers, and I generally paint those in the spring.

My abstract paintings sometimes end up becoming backgrounds for my figurative expressionist paintings, which I put under the category of faces, and then I have a character called SPRKL.

He's an iconic line figure that I paint throughout New York like in SoHo on buildings and gates in the East Village and he or she is like a happy character that brings joy to people. I reserve that character pretty much just to the streets so I've been labeled a “street artist” because of that a little bit and that's okay.

I don't mind being called a street artist.

Within the quadrant of styles, (my faces, flower abstracts, and the character) I also have a multitude of different techniques that I use, such as bronze, steel, glass, silkscreen, clay, wood, giclees, and it all sort of overlaps and makes sense because like when you see a character in the oil paint, it translates into glassblowing and clay figures just as easily, essentially, the sum of all of its parts.

My art is collected by many people throughout the world and also in many museum collections such as the Guggenheim, Patterson Museum, New England Museum of Contemporary Art, the Whitney, the Nassau County Museum in New York, museums in Italy such as the Museo in Teramo, Italy, and the Caserta Museum, also in Italy, and then I also did a residency at the Macro Museum which was sort of a presentation of my work for a much bigger show to come. I transported my entire studio there and I painted there for a week.