John Brosio

There are some new paintings coming up for me to post but, in the mean time, here is a painting I completed a few years ago called “Fatherless Bride.” For many, their response was “WTF?!” but in a mostly favorable way. Like with some of the other paintings here I was “busting out” of what I had been doing and taking plunges into other things. This painting very much lead to a lot of what I am currently doing so I consider this piece to be a major turning point in the course of things.

The dynamics are simple. It is in the language of both low brow and movie poster – a portrait of a fatherless bride (a woman whose relationship with her father was either strained or non-existent), surrounded in some ways by her own head. Like Freud claimed, and correct me if I’m wrong, we remain stunted to some degree in the wake of a childhood trauma. For example, if something traumatizes us enough at a certain age, that part of us does not continue to age with the rest of our psyche until that trauma is sufficiently addressed. So we herein get the surroundings of childhood and a symbol of the pain that is keeping her trapped in that past source of identity and pleasure. And think about it – with folks who have an inner demon there is sometimes a corresponding and sometimes excessive, destructive reach for pleasure to mask it out – the bass and treble both get turned WAY up to balance each other out.

So in that sense I think this is a pretty obvious piece, especially when the title is considered. Folks don’t go there immediately I think because they’re expecting a spaceship to fly out or something but it is at base a movie poster portrait of human sadness.

The skull at the temple, by the way, was lifted from a Kathe Kollwitz drawing. I put it in here among the “facets.”