Studio view  — Photo: Lee Fatheree

I had been looking at Bob Brady’s art for nearly 20 years, but it wasn’t until I saw an exhibit last spring of more than 50 sculptures and drawings at Oats Park Art Center in Fallon, Nevada that I really understood, in a very literal sense, where his work was coming from.  I knew a few things about the artist’s background: his hardscrabble upbringing in Reno, the illness that temporarily debilitated him as a teenager, and how he rejected Funk for a more lyrical mode of expression while earning his MFA degree at UC Davis.  But it wasn’t until I drove through the high desert – to Fallon – that I really “got” how the local environment shaped his art.

At the show’s opening I saw a lot of working people — salt-of-the-Earth types in coveralls, boots, cowboy hats and checked shirts, staring hard at the imaginary hand tools that Brady had fabricated out of wood.  They seemed to understand these objects intuitively, as if Brady’s well-crafted fictions (involving a spinning wheel, a sailor’s tool and other implements to which he attaches great spiritual significance) were, somehow, in their unnatural gallery setting, natural extensions of their everyday lives.  I also saw in Brady’s sculpture and drawings echoes of everything I had witnessed en route to Fallon: snow-capped peaks, roadside mills and mines, sagebrush-swept farms, warnings about secret military installations, trailer parks, and all the neon signs that light up Nevada’s main drags, advertising everything from casinos to beauty parlors.  I also sensed how the UFO lore that persists throughout this region helped spawn the cosmic elements that appear in many of his drawings and in more than a few of his 3-D works. 

"Natomas", 2009, mixed media, 75 x 17 x 13 inches

From the beginning of his 35-year career, Brady, 64, has had a knack for scavenging and creatively re-purposing objects, ideas and experiences.  Whether scouring the desert outside Reno for remnants of broken tools and fragments of glass, reading about tribal art, traveling to foreign countries or sifting through the detritus of his Berkeley studio, Brady has always employed an archeologist’s instinct to help guide his explorations.  He integrates his “finds” into sculptures and drawings that align with his ancient/tribal look — a singular and immediately identifiable aesthetic that has remained consistent over decades, yet pliable enough to absorb continuous embellishment and extrapolation.  This mutability within a signature style has allowed him to keep his work fresh without having to periodically reinvent himself.  

“The figure,” he states, “is the anchor, but I imagine many possibilities in regard to form. I am endlessly interested in the dynamics of line, mass, planes, distortion – setting up dialogues and battles within the piece.” What remains constant in Brady’s career is a relentless desire to expand the vocabulary of wood, his primary medium since 1989, the year he quit ceramic sculpture so that he could build large-scale forms more easily and more fluidly — without the stop-start cycles necessitated by clay and the defects that, through no fault of the artist, can occur in the firing process.

His best-known works, many of which were displayed here, are rough-hewn, long-limbed, figures that appear at life-size and in anatomically challenging poses.  Sitting, standing, kneeling, and sometimes folded into fetal positions, both freestanding and wall-mounted, his sculptures articulate a geometry text’s worth of angles, forms and negative spaces.  They mix delicateness and toughness in roughly equal measure, and employ surfaces that are gouged, abraded, painted and sanded.  Some are so lithe that air currents move limbs around the axis of the pins that hold them in place; while others, like Lepus, in which the star-painted carapace of a wooden fish draped atop a pole, feels epic, like a wedding of sea and sky.

"Patriarch", 1999, mixed media, 77 x 22 x 33 inches

Among the most memorable, if not the most mysterious pieces in this show, are the three, seven-foot-tall figures of the Natomas series.  They are so slight that they appear to be constructed of distressed pool cues; they stand in formation like a phalanx of mute soldiers, greeting visitors without exactly welcoming them.  Like the works of Stephen de Staebler and Alberto Giacometti, two key influences, Brady’s attenuated, mostly androgynous sculptures project the artist’s feelings about mortality through slouching postures and various shoe-gazing contortions.  However, within this realm there are huge variations.  His works are frequently appended with wings, architectural forms and other objects and, as such, they allow the artist to use the figure as a palimpsest of sorts to express his feelings about religion, history, science fiction, biology other topics.  In Confirmation, for example, where the shape of a gothic cathedral cloaks the head, the metaphor of religion on the brain is obvious; but you’d be hard-pressed to wrest a more specific meaning out of it.  Like the Cycladic figures that they recall, Brady’s forms, with their slit eyes, tiny heads and faces devoid of expression, are inscrutable — they mask all feeling and emotion; yet their brooding countenances point to momentous events that befell the artist.

At age 16 (and again when he was 32), he was immobilized by a form of arthritis that put him in the hospital during his senior year of high school.  It was a period of enforced contemplation, where, as Brady recalls it, “I was trapped in a place where I had a lot of time to think.”  Observers have speculated that the experience influenced the emaciated shape and the inward-looking character that is the reoccurring motif of his oeuvre.  Brady remains wary of such cause-and-effect equations, but agrees that the figures speak “of my own bodily experience and image of myself from a young age.  I can identify with being skinny – really skinny, and there was an aloneness that I felt.” 

All 4 drawings: "Untitled", 2009, mixed media on paper, 14 x 14 inches

The unforeseen upside to his illness was being able to substitute a crafts class for an algebra course he couldn’t complete in time for graduation.  “I was given an assignment to make a slab built ‘pitcher’ with no instruction or demonstration; I was only handed a bag of clay and a rolling pin.  Fifty minutes later I had it done and was absolutely in love with clay and the making process.  It spoke to me deeply…I had ability and a good design sense.  With that piece and others to follow I was keenly aware that I owned every part of it…It was mine like nothing had ever been, and it marked the first time I was really good at something.”

Detail: "Confirmation", 1998, mixed media, 87 x 10 x 11 inches

In point of fact, Brady had already proven himself to be adept at a lot of things, particularly earning money.  “The savings, he recalls, “began in kindergarten” with lawn mowing, paper routes and other kid jobs, which were then followed by gardening, painting, furniture moving, grocery checking and restaurant work – all of this before he finished high school.  While his peers were begging their parents to buy things like record players, motorcycles and cars, Brady was paying for them in cash. 

Much later, at Davis, Brady continued to forge his own path. During the mid-1970s when he was earning his MFA, Robert Arneson, the king of California Funk, reigned supreme, shaping a group of artists whose influence persists.  Brady never quite fit in.  “Everything I did harkened to another time, place or layer of history,” he recalls. “I was looking at Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt and Arte Povera.”  In the studio, he found himself torn between figuration and abstraction, and after graduating he took a camping trip to Pyramid Lake in Nevada.  Out of that trip came a series of composite drawings that set him on his current path, first in clay, then later in wood.  “I seemed to find a way to express the figure in a way that had eluded me until then.  Death, isolation, emptiness, pared down and often attenuated, were the characteristics.  They were the characteristics I liked in the work of primitive cultures and in the art of the untrained, Art Brut.” 

Brady, however, claims no intimate knowledge of the ancient and tribal forms that seem to influence his output; nor does he agree with those who see otherworldly aspects in his work.  What he does acknowledge is that his work is becoming increasingly abstract.  A singular example is Area 51.

Foreground: "Area 51", 2010, mixed media, 113 x 31 x 31 inches

It’s an outsized piece named for the U.S. Air Force base in southern Nevada, long been rumored to be harboring the remains of space aliens and their starships.  With its rocket-shaped, nose-cone of a head set on a platform held aloft by four skinny legs, and with its oval-shaped feet adorned with painted-on polka-dot eyes, Area 51 gives palpable form to the rumors.  (It also brings to mind the illustration for the paperback edition of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” that so frightened me as a kid.)  

Brady’s drawings are equally revelatory.  Where his 3-D works have a formal weight and a finished presence, his drawings, though heavily worked, feel looser and more spontaneous – like direct pipelines to the artist’s subconscious.  From them, we can glean possible contexts for his solitary figures.  Rarely seen, they show him to be a masterful draftsman and a collagist of a high order.  In these small-scale works, which include hand stitching, Brady creates a colorful, graphic, universe populated by many of the same forms found in his sculptures: tribal masks, glyphs and extraterrestrials – all which, in the drawings, appear against starry desert skies. 

“I love signs, glyphs and symbols for their simplicity abstractness and mystery.  Connecting points in space or architecture has always sparked my interest.  Drawing constellations is a form of connecting points or dots.  I like the shapes and spatial implications that can occur.”  In one untitled drawing, Brady achieved this by tossing handfuls of rice onto a sheet of paper, spray painting it black and then removing the grains to reveal the negative spaces.  The marks that remain closely mimic a clear night sky; their random spacing feels correct, as if the artist had mapped and drawn to scale the distance separating these points of light. 

"Lepus", 2010, mixed media, 84 x 14 x 11 inches.  Photo: Lee Fatheree

Feeding off such experiments, Brady continues to push his three-dimensional works deeper into pure abstraction. In Kinderslam, a wall-mounted array of oval-shaped wooden discs, each element is painted with two black dots that read like dice “eyes”.  Taken as a whole, the piece alludes to cellular activity in a loopy, cartoonish manner, like something Fred Flintstone might have created had he been a biologically minded sculptor of wood rather than a brontosaurus crane operator.

“I don’t often develop an idea linearly,” says Brady.  “Instead, I move in a circle, picking up and discarding and eventually retracing the path of seeing and finding anew.   I am not interested in squeezing all I can from an idea.  I like variety and change.  I will knowingly and unknowingly borrow from any source, even my own history which informs even what may seem new.”  His practice, he maintains, is omnivorous: “I hover, glance and fly by not wanting to know or see too much.  I pluck the savory and put it in my bag, sometimes remembering and sometimes forgetting.” 

The result is that Brady’s art, through all its transmogrifications, remains firmly tied to the iconography he invented; yet at the same time, it is as extensible and as infinite in its potential as the desert itself.

–DAVID M. ROTH

Robert Brady: New Work @ Braunstein/Quay Gallery, December 16 to Jan. 22, 2011.
Reception: Saturday, December 18, 3:00 – 5:00 pm

Read the Robert Brady interview.

Photos: David M. Roth except where noted.

Katherine Sherwood (detail), “Mansur Nurse from the Yelling Clinic”, 2010, mixed media on canvas, 98 x 30 x 12”

Pairings of big-name artists, especially those of disparate sensibility, are always fraught propositions.   One always wonders how and why such combinations appear and what the connections might be.  In the case of Local Treasures: Six Extraordinary Artists, there are some obvious clues.  One is that co-curator, Richard Whittaker, who collaborated on this show with BAC Executive Director Suzanne Tan, interviewed all of the artists at length for his magazine, works & conversations, copies of which are stationed throughout the exhibit.  The other is that all of the artists have deep roots in the Bay Area art scene. 

By themselves, those are fairly slender pegs on which to hang a show.   However, if you scratch beneath the surface of this one, you find that most of the artists, divergent though their styles may be, deal with two issues: healing and transcendence.  

Berkeley painter and UCB Professor of Art, Katherine Sherwood, examines the workings of the human brain, a pursuit that’s been central to her work ever since she recovered from a cerebral hemorrhage that debilitated the left side of her brain and paralyzed the right half of her body.  The event, which occurred in 1997, forced her to not only relearn language and basic motor skills, but also to paint with her left hand.  Her pictures combine healing symbols that were once employed as seals by King Solomon and photo transfers of her own angiograms – both of which are united pictorially by congealed globs of poured paint that look like frozen-in-time geological events.  

Robert Brady, “Area 51”, 2010, freestanding wood sculpture, 112 x 27 x 32

Two of the works on view here point toward even greater dimensionality.  In Mansur Nurse and Burgundy Nurse (both from the Yelling Clinic series), the artist appends skirts to a pair of vertical canvases to create figures that are practically animate.  Where she once focused exclusively on what was going on inside her head, she’s now creating bodies and accessorizing them with dotted, Indian-looking details accompanied by text that appears to be Sanskrit or Arabic. 

Robert Brady, another long-time Berkeley resident and a former Sac State professor, also traces his beginnings as sculptor to a debilitating illness – one that struck twice: once when he was a teenager and again in adulthood never to return.  Though his work has never been about sickness, the experience pushed him to explore life’s essences, using the figure as a malleable template for wide-ranging explorations of what can be wrought from wood.  His best-known works are emaciated, long-limbed figures whose inscrutable, totemic features call to mind Cycladic sculptures.

They’ve always been highly abstract, but in recent years they’ve become even more so.  Area 51 is a good example.  It’s an outsized piece named for the U.S. Air Force base in southern Nevada, long been rumored to be harboring the remains of space aliens and their conveyances.  With its rocket-shaped, nose-cone of a head set on a platform held aloft by four skinny legs, and with its oval-shaped feet adorned with painted-on polka-dot “eyes”, it gives palpable form to the rumors.

A bigger surprise for Brady watchers, though, may be his drawings.  He’s made them for years but rarely shown them.  Unlike the informal sketches that we are accustomed to seeing from sculptors, Brady’s are exacting, detailed works that incorporate the full range of his iconography, illustrating a world view that could function as a backdrop for a theatre performance – a desert epic, perhaps — that has yet to be staged. 

Jim Melchert, “Untitled Rubbing of Verbs #1”, 1993-4, graphite and black lead on paper, 60 x 49”

Ceramic sculptor Jim Melchert, another celebrated Bay Area figure, gained fame by firing and then painting assemblages of smashed tiles to create wall-mounted sculptures that were at once Conceptual, Op and Minimalist.  The work he exhibits here is markedly different, and as a result it fits neatly into the theme of the show.Two oval-shaped “rubbings” (of graphite and black lead on paper) emit an inner glow through an epidermal surface texture, evoking ancient spiritual and fertility symbols.  There are also two ceramic boxes (Words in an Unknown Tongue) filled with serpentine forms that hit the eye like a kind of visual glossolalia, squirming incomprehensibly while remaining resolutely still.

Livia Stein, who’s traveled extensively in India and whose retrospective opened last month at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, has for years worked with images of Ghandi, a healing figure if ever one existed.  One of them, a monotype simply titled, Ghandi, has an almost reliquary feel, as does the etching called Airplane.

Together, they sound the themes of flight and transcendence that echo throughout the room in works by Brady and by Gale Wagner.  Wagner, who was wounded in Vietnam and used art to self-heal, makes exquisite rubber band-powered model airplanes that dangle from the gallery ceiling, activating the airspace.  His works deserve permanent museum space. 

Squeak Carnwath, “Hours”, 1990, dog tracks, charcoal, graphite, paint stick, acrylic on paper, 72 x 68” framed

With Squeak Carnwath, who last year wowed the Bay Area with a 15-year survey at the Oakland Museum, the curators tried to go beyond the tried-and-true.  She’s best known for lushly painted word and number-filled canvases that function as illuminated diaries.  What we get here are more words than pictures.  They appear in two drawings and in seven framed notebook pages.

The notebook pages I read reluctantly because they seemed too intimate.  But two outstanding drawings– Hours and New Rule – demonstrate the central premise of her work, which is that our thoughts, however small or seemingly insignificant, are worth examining.  For Carnwath that process is the essence of consciousness, validating her own existence and affirming that of viewers as well.  While the absence of her oil paintings is lamentable, oil does show up in an unexpected form: cigar boxes overflowing with raw pigment.  The meaning of these Dada-like objects is hard to fathom, but whatever the intent, they’re a great tactile pleasure.

Flight is the show’s one visible through-line, but the idea doesn’t really fly.  The pictures and objects that relate to flight generate a certain synergy amongst themselves, but they don’t always relate meaningfully to the rest of what’s in the room.

No matter.  The act of bringing artists of this stature together in a community art center setting is commendable.  Each artist has a long history of delving into life’s mysteries and hitting hit pay dirt wherever they choose to strike.  Local Treasures proves it yet again. 

–DAVID M. ROTH

Local Treasures: Six Extraordinary Artists @ Berkeley Art Center through August 8, 2010.

Cover: Squeak Carnwath: Partegas Londres Finos #6, 2001, paint, cigar box (paper covered mahogany), 6 x 8 x 4”.