Bruce Pearson
Bruce Pearson is an abstract painter who attended the San Francisco Art Institute. His large-scale works, made more monumental by their deep relief quality, look a lot like swirling coral reefs and hallucinatory 3D landscapes, rapturous fields of color and highly textured surfaces of well-calibrated, but ambiguous meaning. Cast from phrases literally or figuratively clipped from, among other sources, fashion magazines, product catalogs and bad television, Pearson's dense, hallucinogenic pictures are carved from modest styrofoam, then painted a welter of clashing or complementary colors. The text of each piece is hidden in plain sight, carved in the styrofoam and then painted over. Often, the text is painted into the piece so that if you looked at it a certain way you would be able to read it, but if you looked at it another way, you would see the image but not be able to read the text.
Bruce Pearson is an abstract painter who attended the San Francisco Art Institute. His large-scale works, made more monumental by their deep relief quality, look a lot like swirling coral reefs and hallucinatory 3D landscapes, rapturous fields of color and highly textured surfaces of well-calibrated, but ambiguous meaning. Cast from phrases literally or figuratively clipped from, among other sources, fashion magazines, product catalogs and bad television, Pearson's dense, hallucinogenic pictures are carved from modest styrofoam, then painted a welter of clashing or complementary colors. The text of each piece is hidden in plain sight, carved in the styrofoam and then painted over. Often, the text is painted into the piece so that if you looked at it a certain way you would be able to read it, but if you looked at it another way, you would see the image but not be able to read the text.
In an interview of the artist, Pearson said this about his textual inspirations:
"Well, it's amazing how much stuff you can simply get from the newspaper. I get quotes from all over, from journals, from books I'm reading. I compile the stuff, put it into notebooks. I work on about eight different series of paintings simultaneously. They are different as paintings and also as ideas. Each series has its own conceptual structure and the series are interrelated. I find text for each series. Then I do a drawing. I lay everything out in the drawing and make sure things are working as I want them to. If the drawing engages me, then I move into the painting."
"Well, it's amazing how much stuff you can simply get from the newspaper. I get quotes from all over, from journals, from books I'm reading. I compile the stuff, put it into notebooks. I work on about eight different series of paintings simultaneously. They are different as paintings and also as ideas. Each series has its own conceptual structure and the series are interrelated. I find text for each series. Then I do a drawing. I lay everything out in the drawing and make sure things are working as I want them to. If the drawing engages me, then I move into the painting."
I always thought that keeping an art journal meant doing sketches all the time, but this artist keeps a detailed journal of words and phrases. Each person's research must be intrinsically connected to that artist's passions and goals. For instance, if I was going to keep a detailed art journal, then ideas about teaching kids, how to communicate to them using art or what kind of pictures kids will most connect to, would be the main thing you should find in there.
Pearson's works are really quite stimulating. Looking at them small scale on my computer can be a little sickening because of the bright colors and hallucinogenic patterns. Go ahead and check it out!
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