Donald Bracken ART Habens
New York City, I have spent much of the last 35 years living in rural Connecticut on the Housatonic River. I’ m not fully aware of what’ s going on in the contemporary art world and what other people are doing. The political atmosphere at Berkeley, along with my newfound freedom, made it hard to focus on my studies in a traditional way. In general I worked very hard at what interested me, but I was rebellious and did not paint during painting class because I wanted to free myself from the limitations of rules, so I worked at night instead. I took great pleasure in spraying silhouettes of organic objects on canvas, a process that formed the basis of my desire to incorporate organic elements that I find interesting in my art. I’ ve always thought of myself as a painter, so even when I’ m doing sculpture I approach it as a threedimensional form of painting. At Berkeley I was probably most influenced by George Miyasaki, a well-known lithographer, who was my lithography teacher. He did his own work at night, too, so we would work together. I tend to paint as though I’ m making prints, working with one color at a time in layer upon layer, and to me creating sculpture and mixed-media pieces entails the same process. Back then students were not taught about how to make a career— the word“ networking” didn ' t exist. The best career advice I got from George was to learn how to live cheaply on rice and beans, and just work hard and figure it out. Music and playing guitar also became a vital influence and inspiration to me at that time and has continued to be a source of creative vision. I had Jim Melchert as a conceptual art teacher, and it is curious that at the time I was a bit dubious of its relevance, but as time goes on it has become more and more what my work is about.
Now let ' s focus on your artistic production: I would start from Calligraphy Reclining that our readers have already started to get to know in the introductory pages of this article: and I would suggest to our readers to visit http:// donbracken. blogspot. com in order to get a wider idea of your artistic production … In the meanwhile, would you like to tell us something about the genesis of this interesting project? What was your initial inspiration?
I’ m a process artist— the art of process is very important to me. One thing leads to another; often
I start with an idea, and as I start to work on it, it evolves into something else and often totally different than my original idea. Calligraphy Reclining emerged from a series of evolutions in my work that I can ultimately trace all the way back to that early fascination with organic forms and materials at Berkeley. More recently, around 2007, after I started painting landscapes using earth from the fields I was painting, there was a natural progression toward incorporating other organic materials. I was particularly drawn to the bittersweet and grape vines that drape local woods with gestural, calligraphic, sometimes suggestively anthropomorphic figures.
The first big vine piece I did, Floating Brain, is composed of large swirling synaptic shapes with a suspended brainlike shape floating in the middle. The piece lives on the side of a barn. But when such pieces are removed from their original context and put in another place, such as an enclosed space, they become something different entirely. In 2012 I had a show at New Arts Gallery, a cavernous barn with some ancillary rooms. I filled the space with installations of vine sculptures, beaver sticks, and clay paintings. Will You Still Love Me When I Am Gone, a large hanging vine piece suspended from a swivel that lets it spin in the ambient air currents, was installed in a smallish room. The piece had one association when it was constructed outdoors at my studio, but when put in the room with evocative lighting it spoke to me of my feelings of a dystopian isolation and the disconnection of a doomed long-term relationship.
At first I incorporated vines into dirt and clay paintings, then around 2011, I started wanting to work with them as a material unto themselves, in fully three-dimensional form. I started using tetrahedrons made from rebar a few years ago as a means to suspend the vines so they could twist and turn in the air. Last summer I started employing repeated tetrahedrons with the idea that I could make a sculpture as long as I wanted. Calligraphy Reclining in particular is from a series of sculptures that explore what essentially amounts to scribble drawing on a canvas of air. The material itself, an abundant— and, by humans, abundantly unwanted— intruder in the local landscape, also comments on purpose and perception. I should add that the piece is installed
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