ART Habens Donald Bracken
ART Habens meets
Donald Bracken
An interview by Katherine Williams , curator and Josh Ryder , curator landescape @ europe . com
Donald Bracken accomplishes the difficult task of establishing an effective synergy between painting and movement , creating an area in which emotional dimension and perceptual reality coexist in a coherent unity . Unlike artists such as Carsten Höller , he does not let the viewers in the foggy area of doubt : his evocative and direct approach invites us to investigate about the relation between reality and the way we perceive it . One of the most convincing aspects of Bracken ’ s practice is the way he creates an area of intellectual interplay between perception and memory , contingency and immanence , that gently invites the viewers to explore the crossroad between human emotion and Nature ’ s power : I ' m very pleased to introduce our readers to his refined artistic production .
Hello , Donald , and welcome to LandEscape : To start this interview , would you like to tell us something about your background ? You have a solid formal training and you hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts that you received from the prestigious University of California at Berkeley . How did these experiences influence your evolution as an artist , and how does it impact on the way you currently conceive and produce your works ?
Imagine going from a politically conservative fundamentalist Lutheran family , and ending up at Berkeley during the height of the ’ 60s counterculture , the Vietnam conflict , war protests , and the era of drugs , sex , and rock ‘ n ’ roll . As much as anything , aside from purely academic pursuits , what going to Berkeley did was free me from the constraints of a religious , politically conservative life . I was involved in political activism and protests against the Vietnam war and the political establishment . And I have to say , it was there that I discovered magical realism as a way of seeing things when I create art . Part of what I learned at Berkeley was freedom to experiment with the boundaries of perception , and because of some of these experiments I began to see nature in a totally different way . So oddly enough , much of the work I do now harks back to my time at Berkeley , during which I started to contemplate the physics of life on a molecular level , and the fact that we ’ re composed of more space than anything else . And and like in music the most important thing is the space between the notes .
At Berkeley I got a very strong background in world art history and gained a great appreciation for Asian art and ancient architecture , which continue to be strong influences on me today . I also greatly admired William Turner for his later pre-modern paintings and his philosophy of Nature as being the all-powerful force on Earth . So during that period of experimentation and observing microcosms , fractals , and repeated patterns in Nature , I largely was drawing on forms in nature as my primary influence and inspiration then , as it is now ; because there is no bad form or bad color combinations in nature . I suppose you could say I became a bit of a pantheist .
But I ’ ve never had any real desire to be part of a particular school of art ; I ’ m more of an opportunistic predator of visual and auditory information , eating what I like and leaving the rest behind . Although I grew up in San Francisco and worked and later spent a great deal of time in
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