ART MATTERS to Ellenville: Richard Bruce in Beacon, NY

ART MATTERS and Who Is Richard Bruce, Anyway?

What else matters? Just about everything, drawing up my list, so where do I go from there? A flood of all these mattering things might weaken the persuasiveness of Art Matters to our Ellenville community, but as I pull into the parking lot of the Bulldog Artist Studios in Beacon, I am determined to collect any data that will help me to focus an article on a single artist’s impact on his community and how the community has influenced his art.

Richard Bruce meets me at the back door of Bulldog Artist Studios, where his private studio is situated in the massive reinvented high school, and we walk through the old corridors, up the stairs, with that familiar need to disregard the paltry grey aesthetics of it’s mid 20th century architecture, while engrossed in the forces of mutual expectancy of a shared conversation about his art work and life in the Beacon/Cold Spring community.

Connecting to Bruce’s studios, are other studios (previously classrooms), a dense forest of magical places, with defining thick walls between artist’s spaces. Intending to address ideas about collectives of artists and their relationships to “community”. including the significance of this downtown artists’ studios complex, which was the brainchild of the not-for- profit, Beacon Studio Project, my brain was re-routed.

With specific questions in my notebook about how art matters in Bruce’s community of Cold Springs/ Beacon, I entered his 400’ square space, and, straight away became lost inside - an inhabitant in the imaginary world of Richard Bruce. My rehearsed questions, obediently waiting for the right moment, didn’t happen. The concept of Bulldog Studios dissolved within his painted surfaces, behind the blues, umbers and siennas vying for attention. “Art” and “community development” excused themselves. Silence reigned and pre-determination lost to the best qualified: an entirely unique vision of rivers and skies. Like the endorphin high of a 50 mile bike ride, I couldn’t ignore where these paintings took me. I was transported.

Back at my studio in Cragsmoor, I excitedly resurrected a treasured book from my past, The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, and turned pages until I got to the chapter “intimate immensity” where the writer seemed to be speaking directly to Bruce by supporting the way we process things when we are alone. He says, “immensity is within ourselves”. In his paintings, Bruce creates both separation and fusion of water and sky, with an exquisitely balanced and delicate line, and, in his most recent work, breaks it up into a field of chaotic textural disturbance.

Who is Richard Bruce, anyway? He spends time kayaking up the Hudson, and hiking local trails, when he is not painting. He hopes to take the time for river sweeps with the Beacon Institute for Rivers and Estuaries,
appreciates Gaelic philosophy, and about his work he notes, “I am not trying to create literal depictions of specific places, but am more interested in capturing the experience of the landscape, of being in nature and the inherent spirituality found there.” Bruce received the Hudson River Arts Award in May, 2006. He has had numerous solo exhibitions in NYC galleries and continues to show to great critical acclaim.

Currently his work is being shown at Karin Sanders Fine Art on Main Street in Sag Harbor, NY. through October 26, 2006. Upcoming is a solo exhibit at the Beacon Institute for Rivers & Estuaries: “Wetlands and Bodies of Water”. Sept. 16, 2006 – January 6, 2007. Opening . reception in Beacon: Sat. Sept. 16th, 5pm – 7pm. For information: www.theBeaconinstitute.org.