ART Habens
Donald Bracken
my studio, was conceived as 3 panels high by 4 panels long. In the installation at NCC, the piece became 1 panel high and 12 panels long.
Multidisciplinarity is a crucial aspect of your art practice, and besides kinetic installations you also produce stimulating mixed media works, as the interesting Post 9 / 11. You seem to be in incessant search of an organic, almost intimate symbiosis between several disciplines, taking advantage of the creative and expressive potential of colors as well as of motion: While crossing the borders of different artistic fields have you ever happened to realize that a symbiosis between different disciplines is the only way to achieve some results, to express some concepts?
You know, from an early age I’ ve always loved drawing. I’ ve always loved painting. There was a point in my artistic career when I just felt the world didn’ t need another acrylic landscape painting by me, and so in frustration I picked up a clod of dirt and smeared it on my painting. Then I discovered that I liked the dimension the soil added to the work and so I started using dirt to do landscapes, documenting the disappearing farmlands of Connecticut. I loved the colors of the earth, and I suddenly realized that this made the work not just about the earth but of the earth. It soon became apparent to me that each geographical zone had its own different colors and types of earth that had considerably different characteristics as an artistic medium, and I realized that some earth with high clay content cracked a lot when I made it very thick. I found that there was an interplay between the vision I had for the painting and the nature of the medium, and it felt like I was doing a duet with a jazz musician, because of the medium’ s inherent qualities. When I had the desire to do a 9 / 11 memorial piece, the intrinsic qualities of the clay inspired me to do an aerial portrait of Manhattan because I knew that the clay would give a shattered effect to the image.
Another interesting work of yours that has particularly impacted on me and on which I would like to spend some words is entitled Vestiges of Occupation. In this work you explore the blurry boundary between
Looking East, polymerized clay on canvas on panels, 6.6x 1
collective memory and identity, investigating the psychological nature of the cinematic image: in particular, when I first happened to get to know with this work I tried to relate all the visual information and the presence of a primary element as water to a single meaning. I later realized I had to fit into the visual rhythm suggested by the work, forgetting my need for a univocal understanding of its symbolic content: in your work, rather that a conceptual interiority, I can recognize the desire to enable us to establish direct
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