Bruce Mitchell

Bruce Mitchell
Durham, NC

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.

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.

Selected exhibitions

Bill Hester Fine Art 143-F Franklin St. Chapel Hill, NC	Carolina Semiotics Solo show June 2007
Umstead Hotel & Spa Cary, NC	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
Barrett Art Center 55 Noxon Street Poughkeepsie, NY 12601	"New Directions '02" October 26, 2002 - November 23, 2002 Juried by Joan Young, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim Museum of Art NYC
C.C. Lowell 258 Park Ave Worcester, MA	Solo Show December 2000 - January 2001 See review from The Worcester Phoenix
Pump House Gallery Bushnell Park Hartford, CT	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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