Meet Gary Brewer

My talent was noticed in school, and during high school, I had the good fortune to have a teacher who deeply believed in me and was my only mentor. I carried my drawing pad and pens with me everywhere, drawing portraits of friends and of the neighborhood where I lived. My family was not particularly interested in culture, so my exposure was limited. During high school, I fell into drug use and self-destructive behavior, and though I always made art, it was a dark period. I was kicked out of school several times and barely graduated from high school.

It was two years later in the darkness of the world in which I had fallen that a series of experiences in the form of visions and profound feelings of terror seized my soul and guided me toward the light. I locked my self in my room and spent long days drawing, painting and reading. It was a way to separate myself from friends who had not found their way out of their problems, and a passionate desire to explore and enlarge myself, and my knowledge of the world. I went to the library every week and checked out several books on artists, art history, literature, and philosophy.

It was a deep period of learning and educating myself, and following the leads that I would discover from learning about the artists whom I loved. I became interested and began practicing Zen Buddhism after reading John Cage and learning about his music and philosophy. Though I had always created art, it was when I turned 21 and had been free from drug use for one year that I had a clear insight; my life would be dedicated to the pursuit of art, I would spend my life as a seeker, engaged in the pursuit of the sublime extremes of thought feeling and imagination that painting would allow me.

At 23, I moved from Southern California to the dense, lush Redwood forests and wild beaches of Northern California, living in Santa Cruz for years. I have surfed my whole life, so braving the cold waters of the north – surfing on the vast, empty wild beaches was profoundly beautiful. Several of my studios were just off of Highway 1, North of Santa Cruz. I lived and worked in a 1904 dairy barn for many years, taking hikes into the thousands of acres of wild land in the hills behind my studio. Steelhead salmon would swim upstream after heavy rains to leap over waterfalls to mate and lay their eggs.

Bobcats and coyote, mountain lion and golden eagles lived in the acres around me. My deep love of nature arose from my journeys backpacking, spelunking, surfing, and other experiences; it deeply affected my connection to the natural world. At the time I was painting a form of eccentric abstraction, which was ironic as I was surrounded by and so deeply in love with nature, but I had fallen under the spell of Pollock, Rothko, Brice Marden, and others, and my art was a pursuit to add a line to this deep universe of painting. Later I moved to a loft in San Francisco and met my wife, the artist Aline Mare.

I fell in love with her and our son Cyrus who was just one year old when we met. We all lived in a studio in the Mission, and during this time my interest in abstraction began to fade. I was struggling to re-orient my direction and vision when my wife, Aline, suggested that my deep love and knowledge of nature and natural history could be my guide, to find a way to integrate that love into my work. It was a painful transition with a year of destroying everything that I painted. At a certain point, I was so frustrated that while flipping through an illustrated, 1940’s book on natural history I came upon an image of a Green Bottle Fly.

Something about it caught my eye – I decided that I would just make a straight painting of this insect. I painted it in a day, and when I was finished, I had a path toward a new body of work. I painted insects in vaporous veils of color at first; then more realistic paintings of insects suspended in amber. We moved to Oakland several years later. I had exhausted my interest in painting insects and was thinking of what to do next. It was the year 2000; we lived at the foot of the Oakland hills and vast Redwood forests spread for 30 miles north to south on the east side of the hills.

We would take hikes several times a week, and it was on one of these hikes that my son Cyrus, who was five at the time, took my hat and as we walked he filled it with treasures; acorns, oak leafs, lichens, and moss. When we finished our hike, he looked through his bounty and exclaimed with a five-year-old’s sense of wonder, “You should paint these!” When I returned home, I looked at the lichens under a magnifying glass and was intoxicated with the complexity of their form.

It touched something within me and stirred a philosophical sense that in these primary structures something was conveyed about our very origins, of the creation of life and a sensation of biological memory; that these ancient organisms are in a very real sense our ancestors and from which we emerged. It was a moment of inspiration – an epiphany begot from the eyes of my 5-year-old son. Since this time I have been developing a biomorphic language that conveys a sublime sense of mystery that is expressed organic form.

Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
My path started out with a great deal of insecurity and doubt – I am a self-taught artist, and it is a task to go it alone without a mentor to guide you and help you overcome the soul-crushing self-criticism that can arise in a person struggling to learn how to paint.

I am now a professor of art at a University in Riverside and my autodidactic path, though difficult, has given me a deeper understanding of the dark currents that can inhibit creativity in a young person. It is an understanding that allows me insight into how best to shape and instruct my students and give them the reassurance and guidance that helps them produce work and develop their individual style and process.

It is a profound joy for me to share the knowledge that I have gained through this long apprenticeship with myself. To give insight and knowledge to young minds is a joy, and I feel deeply privileged to have the opportunity to share the understanding I have gleaned in this process.

I have recently become a writer as well, writing articles in the form of studio visit/interviews with artists. Again, the struggle that comes from being self-taught adds a dimension to my understanding of artists, of how they think any of the myriad threads that weave together an image and an idea.

For me, the rough road of the school of hard knocks has added a depth to my understanding of art and artists and of the infinite numbers of trip wires that can make us stumble.

We’d love to hear more about what you do.
My paintings exist in a world apart. The fantastic forms of nature stir the soul and imagination. The swirl of patterns in red coral, suggest the body in its similarity to the striations of muscle. They suggest the pattern of a fingerprint and its natural formations and also take on surreal associations; the human torso, an arm or a leg, or the erotic curves of breasts and hips.

Lichens have an intricate architecture that feels both ancient and modern, the fluid forms and lobed shapes of certain species have the look of a Zaha Hadid building or could be the form that an alien spaceship might take when it arrives from a distant star. Gold, silver and copper, elements forged in the heart of a dying star, are propelled out into space after it’s fiery explosion. Gravity swirls the elements together to congeal and form planets, solar systems, and life.

The backgrounds of my paintings are designs based on NASA imaging of dark matter; the vast web-like gravitation structure that organizes galaxies into clusters and makes up ninety-five percent of the universe. This imperceptible apparition is incomprehensible to us; it is a metaphor of the darkness, the void that surrounds the limits of perception and imagination.

My compositions are carefully articulated to follow the cadences of the dance of sub-atomic particles. Movement, the visual music of the soul, guides the mind and imagination; it is a dance of forms that reflect this unfathomable mystery of existence, consciousness, imagination, and memory.

Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Los Angeles is a remarkable city for an artist to live in at this time. It’s emergence as a major international art center with the museums of contemporary art – the Broad, MOCA and the Marciano as well as the ICLA – and the numerous major international art galleries that have opened is fantastic, both in their collections and the major exhibitions that they bring to Los Angeles.

When we arrived here five years ago from the Bay Area, the generosity and welcoming attitude of artists and galleries was an exciting change. I have had the honor of being asked to exhibit my work in dozens of shows, including two museum exhibitions since our move.

My emergence as a writer has been a direct result of moving to Los Angeles. In my enthusiasm for our new environment, I began posting mini-reviews on Facebook of the exhibitions of friends and other shows that I saw around town. People were very encouraging, suggesting that I begin writing for one of the local magazines.

Though at first, I was reluctant, I began writing professionally just over a year ago, and my articles can be found in Art and Cake as well as Hyperallergic. This year, I was asked to join a new gallery, the Marie Baldwin Gallery and will have an exhibition in January 2019. It is thrilling to live in a major city at a golden moment when the transition to an international cultural center is unfolding.

I have a studio at the Bendix building in DTLA. I was one of the first artists to move in the Bendix three years ago. At that time it was almost entirely filled with clothing manufacturing and designers. It has been transformed into an art building with seven galleries and at least forty artists working and having exhibitions there.

In the past, I have always envied people who lived in Paris at the turn of the 19th – 20th centuries; the zeitgeist and the brilliant artists producing works and feeding off of the inspiration of others, or New York in the 1940’s and 50’s when Pollock and Rothko, Mitchell and Krasner were opening up new worlds of possibilities in the universe of painting.

Living here, now in Los Angeles, we have the privilege to be a part of a flowering of creativity and a transition in the historical canon where more people, women, and people of color are being included in the conversation. The visual record of our patchwork of cultural and ethnic worlds are all being woven together into a rich feast, a movable feast for the 21st Century!