Tim Brawner: The Visionary Artist Unveiling the Hidden Beauty of Everyday Life
Omaha-born, New York-based artist Tim Brawner produces a practice of painting that mines the space between the uncanny and the grotesque. Seeking to produce in the viewer a compelling affect of unease, Brawner utilizes the idiom of illustration to render images of alienation, through the purposeful bricolage of disparate representational elements.
Can you tell us about your childhood in Omaha and how it influenced your artistic vision ?
I think the biggest effect growing up in Omaha had on me was the sense of cultural deprivation. Deprivation in general too, the people there are non demonstrative and could uncharitably be described as cold. I think it's the landscape. There's currently a large migration within the American midwest, and most of my family there has left Nebraska for Minnesota.
Everyone's mood and outlook seems to have improved. I think that can partially be attributed to the chromatic malnutrition you encounter in parts of the Great Plains. Nebraska's landscape is constantly withholding. There is only the mesmeric sway of brown fields caught in the occasional eddy, and that same grass inevitably swallows any landmark that rises out of it (Chimney Rock was once a beacon for those on the Oregon Trail that now only retreats further into the loam every year).
You spend ages waiting for something to appear in that landscape, for somebody to do something. It eventually made me look away. Any multicolor glossy publication or monitor screen pulled my focus. I became like a termite. I would dig through stacks of magazines and comics in the library for any kind of illustration or panel that would shock or confuse me.
Sometimes as a little delinquent I would even clip out the images and save them under my bed frame at home. It gave me a peculiar and intense relationship with all media. I think back on my childhood and the personal interactions and details only become more vague as time passes, but I can tell you quite a bit about what I watched and read.
How did your experience at the Yale School of Art shape your current artistic style ?
I’ve had two experiences at Yale. I attended the Yale Norfolk Summer Art Program while in undergrad and then I attended the MFA program a few years later. People describe MFA programs as traumatic, but I didn't find it that way. Maybe it's because I had a few older brothers growing up but I was already used to fielding criticism pretty directly and not taking it personally. I also didn't have any delusions that a Yale MFA was a guarantor of immediate art stardom, so I didn't feel betrayed when I graduated either. I think, if anything, my experience at Yale taught me that it's okay to go out on a limb. Both times I went it seemed like the painting students were selected for a diversity of approaches, and it created a sense of material exchange and exploration.
I think the most valuable thing for me was getting feedback from artists and painters who were not at all interested in the cultural location of my work. My paintings can be reference heavy for certain audiences versed in morbid/antisocial counterculture, but I really can't think of a lower form of artwork than one that exists solely as a reliquary for cult references, so it's always important to me to see how my work functions for an audience outside of its cultural genealogy.
Molly Zuckerman Hartung and Rob Storr were two critics there who were quite good for me because they were both so game during critiques. They would both take any image you put in front of him and contextualize it in depth for you using their own cultural index. I found that to be generous. It always opened up the work for me in ways that I hadn't considered. I remember it as someone who stresses out a lot over imagery and pictures, especially when a lot of the discussion during critiques was devoted to formal elements and the attention paid to imagery could sometimes boil down to what Eve Sedgwick called "good dog/bad dog" criticism (which I attribute to a matter of climate at the time, not to any particular institution).
Which artists or art movements have had the most significant influence on your work ?
When I was growing up my parents had two art books in the home, one on Norman Rockwell and one on Picasso. I copied a lot from those books. I was in public school too, so around age twelve I made friends with kids who had hippie stoner parents and I began to find underground comix and artists like Robert Crumb, Richard Corben, and Tanino Liberatore.
If, by then, I was too young then to discover those artists then I was certainly too young to discover Suehiro Maruo too, but the developing blogosphere made that introduction possible. Early in high school I also discovered the YBAs and the Chapman Brothers, and I also finally saw works by artists I loved like Ivan Albright, Otto Dix, and George Grosz during childhood vacations to Chicago and Des Moines where my family would indulge me with trips to museums.
Can you describe your creative process, from the initial idea to the final piece ?
I'm currently in a drafting phase for the next solo show. Brainstorming starts with sketching, and then collaging those drawings along with found photographs and illustrations that I keep in a classic illustrator's morgue file. I continue to draft over the results until I arrive at some kind of theme or framework, and then I work the drafts into clean b&w preparatory drawings that I transfer onto the painting surface. Then I paint, using golden brand acrylic paint and mediums.
Nature seems to play an important role in your works. Can you explain how and why you incorporate it into your art ?
Nature featured more heavily in some of my earlier work. At the time I was thinking of American folklore and mythology, painting encounters with chimeras and monsters in the woods, which I thought made for interesting subject matter in a country where cryptid and UFO sightings function as an ersatz for the biblical image of the spirit revealing itself in the wilderness, the experience of which performs the same social function that any spirit journey does of ritual passage into selfhood.
Another nature theme that still persists in the work is animality. This, like horror imagery, I think of in terms of communicating an affective quality and a kind of intuition, rather than playing it straight.
Your works often explore themes of the strange and grotesque. What draws you to these themes ?
An author I think about often, Thomas Ligotti, describes the subject of the “morbid man”. Almost as if it’s a congenital condition. That feels accurate. Grotesquerie is when the distortions of a morbid lens form into a superposition and jumpstart a kind of fertilizing event, where conventional notions of desire and preference fall away, and the results of which can be strange and pleasurable. I don't want conventional pleasures and I don't know why. I don't care to know. I spent a lot of time looking at grubs and insects under rocks as a child.
How do you choose the subjects of your paintings, and what is the significance of the human figure in your work ?
To me, the figure in art is always a predicate for self mockery. It just is. The same principle for the human figure exists in horror and comedy. I assemble the figures in my portraits over the course of drafting detailed above. Recently I've started to think of the subject of a painting as a performance piece. I trained briefly under a cartoonist, and he gave me advice that I think translates to almost all figurative art, which is that in the act of drafting an image you are both actor and director. In the current crop of images I'm working on this notion is translating literally, I've been drawing interpretations of a Norma Desmond type of character.
Can you tell us about one of your favorite pieces and the story behind it ?
I have a drawing I've never shown. I made it after something bad happened. It was a really venomous piece. It's the first thing I made after being blocked for a bit after undergrad. I included it in the portfolio portion of my grad school application and I was certain someone would see it and I would be rejected because of it. I still have it in a folder in my flat file. I would love to show it someday. That might be my favorite piece.
What role do you think art plays in understanding personal identity and the human condition ?
For me, art in its most basic sense is anything that, by itself, points outside of the material world and towards subjectivity. I prefer artists who can't help but reveal themselves in their work, and who do so without any vanity or fear.
I think art is best when it coincides with obsession and fetish as well. While I don't believe in reducing art to an excretion of the subconsciousness, I do think one of the benefits of art is that it can be analyzed forensically, to study the subjectivity that produced it, as well as the society that produced the artist.
How did you develop your technique of blending abstraction, realism, and symbolism ?
That's difficult. I'm not sure I think about executing certain elements of a painting in an abstract way, or a realistic way, or symbolic way. I think perhaps I have a higher degree of openness than some when it comes to what kind of visual content I consume, and I don't discriminate when it comes to genre or convention.
Perhaps this tendency reappears when I'm working without me noticing it. The final images for paintings tend to go through extensive drafting, and the stylistic incongruities are also maybe the result of stubborn artifacts left over from previous iterations. I try to preserve some of those moments selectively.
What challenges have you faced as an artist, and how have you overcome them ?
The same challenges most artists face. If you aren't independently wealthy and you don't have proximity to the art world it can be difficult to get by and make a living at first. I don't know what advice I can give other than practicing consistency and patience. Being an artist is like being a termite. Don't get psyched out trying to take down a whole house by yourself all in one go, just keep drilling into the thing deeper and deeper until you get somewhere.
How do you see your art evolving in the coming years ?
I see it going through a process of clarification. In the beginning I was working almost entirely from a sense of intuition, and each successive show I've found I'm trying to find a more specific framework to generate paintings.
Can you talk about your involvement in art education and what you hope to impart to your students ?
I have a strong desire to teach. I think I'm good at it. My mom was an educator and I have a deep respect for the profession. I haven't really taught since I was a TA in graduate school. I got a lot of joy out of talking to students. I have a basic pedagogical approach for teaching depending on the level of experience in the class and the subject I'm teaching, but I mostly try hard to replicate the same things my professors did for me.
My favorite professors tried to understand my creative interests and motivations without judgment and exposed me to art that they hoped would give me a sense of direction. If a student leaves a class with a sense of direction and purpose in their work I think that's more important than arriving at a highly polished art object, if they're dedicated that comes naturally.
In undergrad I had a professor named David Gracie who really gave me a crash course in art by sending me home with a different artist's monograph from his personal library every week based on his reaction to whatever assignment I turned in. I think students need to feel like you see what they're doing and that you're taking their potential seriously in order to develop in the arts.
How do critics and public reactions influence your work ?
I think art is like any discourse, you need to identify who you actually want to be in dialogue with. The specific utility of any criticism is conditional based on who's giving it and why. I think I'm like any artist in that I desire honest criticism but I don't want to be a reactionary and pivot based on just anything I'm told. In general though, I think the art world could use a little more hardball criticism, just to get a dialogue going.
What advice would you give to emerging artists looking to find their own artistic voice ?
It's a case-by-case basis. I think the main thing is how it should feel when you make the work. I think painting should feel natural and pleasurable, but not completely uncomplicated. If it's too difficult you're probably trying to make someone else's work, if it's too easy you're probably just being reiterative, maybe even regressing.
