Bruce Park Artist Statement
I am formally trained in the fundamentals of drawing and painting. Not just learning the basics of art, but having the fundamentals drilled into you through intense years of figure drawing and animal drawing. It wasn’t until I began to focus on the landscape that I started to understand creativity and working intuitively. This is when I began to truly share my unique intimate experience with the landscape I painted. It is not just being able to draw a contour or to understand the proportional relation of shapes or to convey a texture, it is painting what I feel about this intimate connection with the earth.
I paint primarily through the language of color. In both my oil paintings and pastel paintings I use many layers of color to capture the depth and feel of the vastness of a panoramic landscape or the fleeting softness of clouds. Color layers allow me to express the intensity of a summer sunset, the gentle light after an afternoon rain or the vivid hues of autumn. I intuitively choose my colors for the feeling of the light and not to match the local color. For example, I seek the feeling of light on that distant mountain range versus just making a grey/blue tint. This is the intimate connection with the earth I want to share in my paintings, and if I am creatively successful, other people can resonate through my paintings of their own connection to the earth. Having people connect to the earth through my work is very important to me because it is my opinion that the trend in society today is profoundly disconnected with the earth.
- BFA in drawing from the College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA
- MFA in painting from Montana State University
- My work belongs to over 80 international, national public, corporate and private collections.
