LAWRENCE GIPE, RICHARD BRULAND by Suvan Geer
ArtScene June/July, 2018 (excerpt)
In this age of instant communication painting is an outlier. Time is imbedded in it by the very labor of its making. Laurence Gipe uses his paintings to stimulate considered thought between a historic image and what it might signify to us now, given enough time. Richard Bruland’s abstract paintings however go another way, quite literally making time a physical and visible thing.
Bruland paints in layers; applying thick bright acrylic squiggles of color, one over another in intricate patterns that are allowed to dry and build up texture. He sands the ridges down to reveal the colorful accumulation of paint below then adds more paint. Layer after layer accumulates and is worn down again, until a vivid but complex surface of vibrating color remains that reads, finally, like an improbably dimensional shimmering atmosphere of color-flecked darkness or light. This is a laborious, time consuming painting process that the artist celebrates in this series, entitled “WHOA!”.
If it requires Bruland to work slowly, it asks the viewer to slow down as well. “Sombracito” reads like falling into a midnight blue chasm in the deepest part of the ocean. Light, bright colorful ridges at the top and bottom of the panel seem to be moving with us as we move forward and back, seeing details up close then losing them again in the deepening color in the center as we retreat. That can be a rewarding motion to repeat, a kind of visual inhale and exhale flooded with a shower of unexpected colors.
(Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica June 2 – July 14, 2018)
RICHARD BRULAND - Peripheries at Lora Schlesinger Gallery
Art & Cake, 18 February, 2017 by Amy Kaeser
Peripheries, Richard Bruland’s fourth solo showing at the Lora Schlesinger Gallery, located in Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station, presents a new series of paintings which focus on the way the eye sees and perceives, and what lays on the outer edges of our vision. Bruland’s emphasis in this new body of work plays with the tension created by the edge of the frame and what lies within the chaos of the colorful acrylic layers of paint. Controlled by the hand of the artist, the panels are sanded down, thus revealing natural peaks and valleys of paint underneath. If the colors chosen for a particular work are bright and vibrant, the wash on top subdues them from being too forceful, as seen in Bella Andajina, 2016, a 30 x 30 acrylic painting on panel. Within the work on the edge of the muted white wash, the true color is exposed—only a sliver revealed but directs the viewer’s eye to the outer edge none-the-less.
As with all the paintings of this series, the physical nature of each work is inherent. It would be hard not to compare aspects of Bruland’s work with an artist like Jackson Pollock, whose all-over compositions and “energy field” paintings made him the hero of Modernism in the 1950s, giving rise to Abstract Expressionism. Bruland’s smaller and uninformed panels do have the frenzied energy of what, at first look, is a “drip” painting, but on closer inspection, the viewer realizes there is something more complex at play. There is texture; the subtle dips and hills left by sanding away multiple layers of paint make the panels visceral in a way completely unlike traditional paintings. The image conjured of Bruland sanding each panel, some 30 x 30, 36 x 36, and 24 x 24, leaving behind sweat (and perhaps tears and blood at some points) is akin to the notion of the artist’s hand being the driving force of the work itself. Although the product of Bruland’s efforts are the reason this is his fourth solo show at Lora Schlesinger’s gallery, the process can not be denied as a crucial part of his artistic production.
Resolutely abstract, a clear departure from his previous work of atmospheric landscapes, each panel has a distinctly unique surface. Although the technique is the same throughout, the finished panels invoke images of evenings cast in shadows, bright sunsets or early morning sunrises, and hazy, mid-summer days. A feeling is present in all the works; not a literal sense of a particular place or time, but a connection between what we see and what we feel from our memories. Perhaps this is what is the key to the series, the insight of thinking of both the center of things, as well as the less-explored edges of our minds-eye. Exploring the relationship between the edges and centers of his panels, Bruland’s Peripheries is now showing until February 25, 2017.
Richard Bruland has exhibited work since 1988 in and around the Los Angeles area and is represented by galleries across the United States. A graduate of California Institute of Arts where he received his BFA, he previously studied at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.
Artist Talk: February 25th, 2017 at 3PM at Lora Schlesinger Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404. Phone: (310) 828-1133
http://www.loraschlesinger.com
LOS ANGELES TIMES ENTERTAINMENT & ARTS
Review: RICHARD BRULAND’S’ resonant paintings anything but simple
By HOLLY MYERS DEC. 7, 2012
Viewed from a distance, Richard Bruland’s paintings at Lora Schlesinger Gallery appear to be simple gradations of muted color, reminiscent of sky tones at dawn and dusk. At close range, however, they are anything but simple.
Take a step or two in and their seemingly coherent hues dissolve into a chaotic mélange of multi-colored dots. Take another step and these dots reveal themselves to be three-dimensional: not points at all but layers that have been unevenly applied, then painstakingly sanded down to reveal dipping and shifting strata of color.
What might have passed as just a clever visual trick — the translation of basic televisual optics onto the surface of a canvas — deepens with a recognition of the process into a feat of considerable energetic complexity.
Bruland strikes an improbable balance between the soft, atmospheric hues at the surface and the brasher colors underneath, between tonal gradation and splintered dispersion, between the smooth, sanded surface and the uneven geologic layering it reveals. The act of sanding, moreover, lends each piece a tender air of meditative resonance.
These are paintings that have been worked at, pored over, tended to at visibly strenuous length. Each feels, to some degree, like an act of devotion.
Lora Schlesinger Gallery, 2525 Michigan Ave. T3, Santa Monica, (310) 828-1133, through Dec. 29. Closed Sunday and Monday. loraschlesinger.com
Richard Bruland at the Gail Harvey Gallery, Santa Monica, CA, by James Scarborough http://perhapsperhapsperhaps.typepad.com/what_the_butler_saw/2006/09/richard_bruland.html
“NEW FADES”, RICHARD BRULAND at Gail Harvey Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
SEPTEMBER 29, 2006
Better than the recent autumn equinox and just as awesome, Richard Bruland’s New Fades at the Gail Harvey Gallery make you feel downright omnipotent without the messy hubris that attends such perspectives.
Canny Bruland, he one-ups Leonardo DiCaprio and Karen Carpenter who crowed and crooned they were on top of the world.
Instead he puts us in outer space to view with delight and muse with insight upon what happens as the earth not only rotates on its axis but also spins around the sun. The work, after all, is about light and its absence, life and death. Might as well get a shuttlenaut’s eye view.
Twenty paintings, acrylic on panel, large (60”x18”), small (12”x12”), vertical as in landscape, horizontal as in figurative. You relate to them up close as you relate to a relative who exasperates but otherwise intrigues you or else from afar as you ogle over a gorgeous view. The pictorial space is ambiguous; it’s murkiness could be similar to atmospheric effects that give a planet faux-volume. Or not. In any event, the forms seem globular and prickly, like a paper-mache balloon.
To an unusual degree reproductions of Bruland’s work do not begin to do justice to his attention to detail. That’s why you have to go into the gallery to see them for yourself.
The pieces remind me of parched earth if the world was drawn with each and every one of the 64 crayons in the Crayola box with the sharpener in back. Up close the work requires jigsaw puzzle assembly obsession, a puzzle whose pieces are the same size and shape. How hard would that be to put together? You notice two kinds of color schemes to the work. One mutes the work; one supercharges it. Neither degrades the pyrotechnic surface effects.
In Dropped Blue, bright yellow tapioca-shapes skirt the surface. In Convoke, it’s little gray amoebae. Bruland’s surgical brushwork forces you to come up close, let your eye gambol over successive vertical bands of coiled filigrees of color, and make a gazillion little local excursions over each square inch of the surface of each piece. The luminous effect reminds me of Les Tres Riches Heures, the precious calendar paintings the Limbourg Brothers did for Jean, Duc du Berry: irrespective of subject matter the work glowed like stained glass. Tres riches, indeed.
The work also requires that you step back to notice how each piece not only shimmers and quivers but also darkens from the bottom. Hence the show’s title, New Fades. Sometimes as in Blue Gust, Agapimou, and Rosaria, the fade is severe; it crawls up the canvas the same way Socrates reported the numbness crawled up his leg after he ingested arsenic.
Why the fade?
Bruland doesn’t only activate the surface space, he also reminds us of our mortality. Each piece is hectic and active – like you, you overachiever - at least in the upper regions of each canvas. But then, as sure as day turns to night – unless you’re in Las Vegas - darkness encroaches from the bottom.
To watch Bruland’s shadows eclipse the brightness is to watch the way an eye closes, the way a theatre curtain drops. That reminds me of Hans Hoffmann’s Equinox, in which a vertical line bisects a large canvas into day and night, each portion painted with attendant nocturnal and diurnal qualities of mystery and clarity. The brushwork gives the work an all in-the-moment fun spirit but the composition gives the work its overall contemplative mood, a little winsome, especially after all the fireworks that preceded it.
Bruland's is a dreamy concept, really, the foresight to live in the moment in the face of oblivion. A stark ethical stand, a little Dionysian (yes!), a little Apollonian (oh, alright), and a heck of a lot of fun to look at.
The exhibition runs until October 14. Gallery hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 11 – 5 PM. The gallery is located at Bergamot Station B –5. For more information call (310) 829-9125.
ArtScene CONTINUING AND RECOMMENDED EXHIBITIONS
MARCH, 2003
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RICHARD BRULAND’S East of Western show is uncompromising in it’s pursuit of the “flat, picture plane” on the wall, after Clement Greenberg’s articulate insistence of the late 1940’s. The viewer is directly presented with lovingly handcrafted flat objects that are mounted on a wall. They assert themselves as artificial objects with an alien primacy. As you move back and forth, a physical space within the picture plane seems to perceptually cohere, a three-dimensional containment of haze and atmosphere.
Using an undercoating of graduated tertiary color overlaid with a textured clear medium, the artist applies a second coat of different secondary tertiary hues over the sandwiched clear medium. With a sanding block he then proceeds to even out the raised areas of clear medium and to gradually expose the undercoating. This process of perceptual discovery, of layering and revelation of accidental shapes as the bumps in the surface are worn away, continues for a viewer looking at and “through” the random filigree of shapes produced. A sense of exploration informs these works and though they may seem to suggest imagery such as roadways going off into the haze of the distance, or upper and lower atmospheres of the sky, they remain resolutely and elegantly just what they are: handcrafted flat objects, mysterious touchstones that question how we see the world, which point at once away from it and towards it. There is a powerful, almost monastic, self-sufficiency in all of this. -Ray Zone
Richard Bruland East of Western at Gallery 825 Annex, Santa Monica. Thru March 8, 2003
RICHARD BRULAND at Ojalá Fine Arts and Crafts
Never be afraid of making an elegant painting….
-Paul Brach’s advice to the artist, 1971
To absorb a Richard Bruland painting, you don’t need to stand in an ideal relationship to it. As long as you are anywhere, near or far, it seems to have meaning; of course, not always the same meaning. Most of these easel-sized works (the largest is 24 inches by 48 inches) are rectangles or squares; a couple are flat, angular polyhedrons, which seem to bend space away from you. One is a skinny, slightly curved linear thing, 90 inches tall by ½ inch wide, yet it holds. These clean vertical/horizontal abstracted landscapes are beautifully painted, but seldom with a brush.
Unlike a work by Paul Klee, its small size and graphic quality requiring close reading, or a huge Jackson Pollock drip mural, which encourages you to back up a distance in order to be hit with the full impact of its blobs and skeins of paint, Bruland’s intimate paintings create a different space every time you move closer or farther away. It is an uncanny space, neither real nor unreal, resonating with the sense of an unknown presence that seems to extend beyond the picture itself, especially when vertical shadows seem to materialize along the edge.
Bruland is eager to share his secrets. He won’t volunteer too much, but when he is asked, he’ll give away the store. He’ll tell you what he was thinking about when he made the piece and anything you want to know about the craft of making it. To the viewer he says, “There are no wrong responses.”
Specifically, his way of working is to lay down a layer of thick acrylic gel mixed with color, then press a flat wood board into the paint, and snap it away from the surface. This raises a texture, which is allowed to thoroughly dry. He then applies numerous layers of paint with a brush, and finally sands the texture back down. Occasionally, to modify a color, as in the painting Petit Saléve Too (Saléve is a mountain outside Geneva) he will float a thin sudsy layer of paint over the surface and then pound on it with a destroyed brush, creating a wet, bubbled surface, and when dry, resulting in a soft, shimmering surface. He never modifies the paint by “noodling” with a small brush. Whatever forms on the panel is the result, largely of chance operations on paint of various consistencies, with a certain minimal amount of color planning. So the result is never a total surprise
In this way, the artist relates himself to the space-time conundrums of Surrealist thinking, by means of sometimes ominous, sometimes richly atmospheric colors, appearing as nearly invisible horizontal or vertical stripes. In Floaters, a painting he was working on September 10-11, there is an overall golden shiver of color through which small, indistinct, fiery shapes appear to fall. The New York City tragedy was unfolding as he worked, and although the painting was almost finished the day before, the “ground zero” news prompted him to rotate the painting ninety degrees, changing it from a horizontal composition to a vertical one.
Petit Saléve Too, with its transparent veil of bubbly soft yellow, has an illusion of being partially covered with skin – like something that is healing and growing. The cues are subtle, but provide the means to read whatever comes into your head, whatever subversive thoughts you may have in its presence, a genuine collaboration with the work -Isabel Anderson
Richard Bruland: Lines & Shadows & Fades (Oh My!)
Closed in October, 2001 at Ojalá Fine Arts and Crafts, Los Angeles
Isabel Anderson is a freelance writer based in Southern California