John Brosio

Okay, an ACTUAL NEW PAINTING! This is very much me harking back to my “Edge of Town” series which, over the course of itself, reveals my successive results in learning how to paint. In this particular painting, finished only a couple months ago, I found myself in a way “not caring” because I was somewhere I had been too many times already. So, in the very middle of attempting this image I reached a “f**k it” moment where I almost put it aside but instead just took a mound of paint and puked out the sky you see here – done out of a kind of apathetic abandon and the results were very pleasing to me. What kind of message does that send?!!!! Hmm – Richard Bunkall used to tell me that “apathy can be your friend.” Misleading at first but think about it for a moment.

Anyway, I think that as a result, this painting pushes the range of relationship between threat and safety. The donut stand is more intimate and cozy and solitary than my usual street setting and the twister is more menacing. In the end I liked it and chose to finesse it and close it out. The results are “Edge of Town 11.” I will return to this series in the future but for now I’m done I think unless something happens by accident. I want to raise the stakes way up in any next version of this orchestration.

Another thing – if you zoom in and look at the lights on the horizon at left you’ll see that they are pretty much single brush strokes/ notions and it is a direction I intend to further explore. Earlier incarnations of this motif have a lot of relatively “over the top” description in these areas and I hope to move away from that.

The donut stand, by the way, is a place I pass by quite often and have always wanted to paint. It is open 24 hours and sometimes folks sit outside there and play chess at 4 in the morning. I love it, seeing those folks wrapped up in an existence that is somehow sustained with almost no adherence to what daily grind we cannot see our way out of. I feel a weird kind of envy when I see that.