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Bruce
Mitchell |
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I was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts and have lived in North Carolina since 2003. My work is currently represented by Bill Hester Fine Art, Chapel Hill, NC. I took up painting in 1980. At that time I was employed by one of those hotel/motel "art" operations, where I learned to stretch canvas and mix paint. Prior to that, I was trained as a draftsman using the old-fashioned T-square-and-triangles methods at a trade school and had a couple jobs as a draftsman. In the early 80s, I went on to open a notorious punk club, Xit, with my friend, Tom. That was a lot of fun, but I could handle only a few of years of the wild life, so after that I went to work for the late, great Digital Equipment Corporation, where I spent fourteen years. I got recruited to work at CIGNA HealthCare in Connecticut in '97. I was there for five years, in various management and marketing roles. Through all those years of working corporate jobs to pay the bills, I was also able to devote all my off hours to painting and develop my own style in realism and my own vocabulary of forms in abstract painting. I finally broke the corporate bonds in 2002, moving to Northampton, MA to paint full time. After only a year or so, I was asked to help start up a new marketing research firm in Chapel Hill, NC, which I did. As it happens, it was my old friend Tom who asked me. Together we built a very successful firm, W5, catering to Fortune 500 firms and advertising agencies. I've since left W5 to return to my passion, painting, full time. Almost everything I know about how to paint I've figured out for myself by working in the studio. I've learned a great deal about other aspects of art by visiting a lot of galleries and museums, reading a lot of periodicals, and through liberal use of public libraries. The best way to learn about painting is to paint, so I spend as much time in my studio as I possibly can. I have worked in a variety of styles and media, exploring different approaches to both realism and abstraction in parallel. In the more than twenty years I've been at it, I've tried out a variety of styles. For a while I was doing mainly realism (landscapes, cars, cities, houses, etc.). In the late '80s, I was using Dorland's wax medium with oils to make abstract pictures that have thick, crusty surfaces and interesting visual effects. These pieces don't reproduce well, so most of them are not seen here on my web site. The series of abstract paintings I've been making since the mid-1990s are oils on canvas or masonite panels. The recent representational pieces (telephone poles, signs, clouds, etc) are also almost all oil on canvas. See "About the Paintings" for more details about these. Over the years, I've also used other media, including acrylic, watercolor, collage and drawing with ink, pastel, and graphite, as well as printmaking with both drypoint and linocut techniques. I use oils more than anything else, though, because that's what I like. |
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Artist Statement
My paintings are about the human condition, about being in this world at this
time. For me, as for most 21st century Americans, this means being in the built
environment most of the time, and that is the proximate subject depicted in
most of my recent representational works. I make paintings of commercial signs,
street signs, telephone poles, and similar elements of our environment partly
because these are so ubiquitous and familiar that we tend to take their presence
for granted even though we depend on them in our day-to-day lives. Signs guide
us to our destinations or indicate where we can obtain necessities such as food,
energy, and lodging, while the core infrastructure represented by telephone
poles makes possible the online world on which we have come to depend.
To me, these images are rich in allusions and metaphors relating to our civilization
and the connections between us, including our cultural and industrial history.
That said, I do not necessarily seek to comment on our way of life through these
paintings. My own primary interest is decidedly more painterly. Regardless of
the proximate subject, my paintings are explorations of the relationships between
light and shadow, figure and ground, color and space. I seek to capture a mood,
a certain slant of light, a moment in time, and all the underlying allusions
and metaphors are there to support that aim. Moreover, my paintings lend themselves
to very personal interpretations on the part of each viewer.
My recent abstract paintings belong to a series I've been working on since
the mid-1990s. Their stylistic precursors date back to the early '80s, most
notably a vocabulary of forms I developed in making hundreds of drawings on
paper napkins. The central themes here are ambiguity and play. The forms have
no overt models in the real world, yet they frequently resemble things like
amoebas and eyeballs. The forms lack any shading to suggest 3-dimensional shape.
Thus, any impression of depth comes from the contrasting colors, the contours
of the forms, and their relationship to each other and to the background. The
absence of real-world references also introduces ambiguity about scale; the
forms could be any size from microscopic to monumental. The viewer is drawn
in by the lively colors, then engages in puzzling over what the forms might
represent, their scale, and the depth of the picture plane. In this way, the
fun of making these paintings is shared with the viewer.
| Bill
Hester Fine Art 143-F Franklin St. Chapel Hill, NC |
Carolina Semiotics Solo show June 2007 |
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Umstead Hotel & Spa |
Picture This - Art & Photography Exhibit
to benefit Prevent Child Abuse North Carolina April 14, 2007 |
| Bijou
Cinema 110 Front Street Worcester, MA 01609 |
Solo Show April 4, 2003 - April 28, 2003 |
| New City Art Gallery 116 Pleasant Street Easthampton, MA 01027 |
"Small Works Invitational" December 1, 2002 - February 1, 2003 |
| West
Hartford Public Library 20 South Main Street West Hartford, CT 06107 |
Solo Show January 3, 2002 - February 28, 2002 |
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Barrett Art Center |
"New Directions '02" October 26, 2002 - November 23, 2002 Juried by Joan Young, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum of Art NYC |
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C.C. Lowell |
Solo Show December 2000 - January 2001 See review from The Worcester Phoenix |
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Pump
House Gallery |
Juried show, 1997 National Arts Program National Endowment for the Arts |
| Worcester
Artist Group Worcester, MA |
Solo show, 1989 |
| Atwood Gallery 69 Hammond Street Worcester, MA |
Group show, 1989 |
| Gallery 35 35 Institute Road Worcester, MA |
Group show, 1987 (with an artists' collective I founded, known as the pARTy) |
| Grove Street Gallery 100 Grove Street Worcester, MA |
Various juried shows, 1983-1987 |
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© Bruce G. Mitchell