John Brosio

Okay, this one leans back a little more toward allegory. This is called “Jerk in a Field” (36 × 29) and I was thinking of our very voyeuristic tendencies as humans – at least as entertainment goes. All those shows with people getting rejected and “voted off” while the rest of us tune in to study the face of the person being humiliated at the moment they’re being humiliated. That’s my impression of it at least. I don’t know if it’s more sick or more boring but the part of it all that does fascinate me is that it depends on some very deep, natural traits we have as social creatures. We are built to respond to hierarchy but taught to not always engage it. So it becomes maybe a kind of fetish.

Maybe.

So I’m not quite sure exactly what I was planning here. I just know that it worked when I hit it. And it was quickly needed for a show so I simply photographed Tom Miller in the light of my porch and gave him a Corona to work with. I definitely wanted a kind of “frat” thing going on here too – a kind of pseudo-erudite presence. And the twister is, like in a lot of my other paintings, “over there.” Almost as if it were on t.v.

Now – two other very important elements here are that dog (very much lifted off of the horse in A. Pinkham Ryder’s Race Track painting) and the other beer bottle on the ground. To me these are hugely abstract considerations in that they activate and make steps to the distant spectacle. This would be a very clumsy painting if there were not these “rest stops” between human and funnel cloud. Those two tiny elements were painted over a few times until they settled in. That bottle moved around quite a bit until it finally ended up in the right place. In fact, it was completely horizontal at one point and looked as if to block and section off our foreground and background from one another.

Also, the dog bridges back to front by literally crossing over from bottom to top. It is very subtle but look at how his ears stick up into the sky. Again, very intentional.

And the road leading somewhat toward the distant features on the far right was also very important in bridging front to back. The middle ground of this whole painting kicked my butt way more than the figure or storm. Look for instance at how the road and bottom of the cloud deck converge toward the right. Think of how static things would be if that road started on the lower right and rose to the left – that would suck. Look too at how the open triangle created by the divergence of road and cloud deck “open” in the direction toward which this figures gazes. All VERY intentional because I had to paint my way out of this one like a puzzle.

Look too at the little piece of cloud “scud” hanging in the air to the left of the funnel – maybe the tornado’s “beer bottle.”

And last but not least is the central, converging composition. The tornado enters from above, somewhat cropped, and calls for my figure to be cropped – one main element of the painting is heading down while the other, the figure, heads “up.”

Here is what critic Kim Russo in Santa Fe wrote about in as part of an exhibit there. And I think she pretty much got it: There is also a quote from me that sounds half way intelligent.

John Brosio’s work “Jerk in a Field” is a poignant human comedy. A man drinks a beer while he passively watches a tornado heading his way. The message (trouble is on the horizon, and we are absurdly partying down) is what sticks in the viewer’s mind. The realistic style of the work keeps the message from being abstract; copying nature is not what the painting is about. In his artist’s statement, Brosio writes, “I tend to think of my work as more allegorical than anything, often calling juxtaposition into play, grabbing for what is “larger than life” and exploring its role in modern American identity. It is this identity which fascinates me, our increasingly constant — maybe even numb — relationship to the overt and extreme which drives the work. And the challenge for me, the fun, is an exploration of how to anchor a choice of visually allegorical elements — often seemingly disparate — into the truly inevitable relationships they actually are.”