Local Color by Jonathan Van Brunt

Local Color by Jonathan Van Brunt

Saturday, August 17th, 2024 from 12:00pm - 3:00pm

Sunday, August 18th, 2024 from 12:00pm - 3:00pm

Saturday, August 24th, 2024 from 12:00pm - 3:00pm

Sunday, August 25thth, 2024 from 12:00pm - 3:00pm

ABOUT THE SHOW:

Long Island landscape paintings in oil and acrylic

ARTIST BIO:

Born and raised in Freeport, NY. Jonathan is the youngest of seven and the only one of his siblings who showed a great interest in making art, yet he cites the influence his family had on his decision. From his parent’s collection of illustrated books to the countless record albums and magazines belonging to his brothers and sisters, visual art was never out of reach at home.  Jonathan studied printmaking at the Maine College of Art, developing an interest in materials through the process of traditional etching and lithography. As a graduate student at Ohio University School of Art, he integrated his love of materials into large abstract painted wood pieces, through which he focused on fragmented compositions using found objects. Moving back to Long Island, he developed an appreciation for the hidden landscapes of the area through his explorations of the state and county parks in the company of his two children. The vast expanses of the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean combined with the spiked grass and branches hugging the small creeks and ponds throughout the island became the perfect vehicle for his paintings and offered the opportunity to celebrate the local landscape.

ARTIST STATEMENT:

"A painting is not a picture of an experience but is the experience." -Mark Rothko 

My development into a landscape painter came through trial and error. I was an abstract painter for most of my formal training and my focus was creating images that explored the formal layout of the picture plane using expressionist brushwork and found objects. I enjoyed working, and I would spend hours in my studio working on paintings and experimenting with different brushes and tools to paint with. I was open to trying different ways of applying paint, using the opposite end of a brush, rags, or paint directly applied from the tube. Since I also spent a great deal of time outdoors, I noticed that my pictures were in tune with the patterns found in nature, but since I worked strictly abstract, those experiments never developed into a representational picture. By chance, I was assigned to write an in-depth analysis of Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of Painters for an Art History assignment. At that time, those artists appeared overly sentimental and lacking depth. However, I soon discovered that while those artists wanted to document the land around them, they also had a divine connection with the natural world. This resulted in pieces that were impressive as renderings but also very dramatic in an abstract way, especially when it came to skies and storm clouds. To me, it was an obvious conclusion that I would use the landscape as inspiration to make pictures that incorporated the uninhibited textures in nature but followed the natural order of composition.

website: http://vanbruntart.blogspot.com/