BROOKE STROUD: NEW WORK

Transcription

1 BROOKE STROUD: NEW WORK

2 RESONANT FREQUENCY, 2017 ACRYLIC, GRAPHITE, COLOR PENCIL, AND OIL PASTEL ON PANEL 24 x 18 INCHES

3 BLOOD MOON, 2017 ACRYLIC, OIL PASTEL, AND AEROSOL PAINT ON PANEL 10 x 8 INCHES TELSTAR, 2018 ACRYLIC AND AEROSOL PAINT ON PANEL 16 x 12 INCHES

4 PERMAFROST, 2017 ACRYLIC, OIL PASTEL, AND AEROSOL PAINT ON PANEL 16 x 12 INCHES REQUIEM, 2016 ACRYLIC, OIL PASTEL, AND AEROSOL PAINT ON PANEL 14 x 11 INCHES

5 K DESCENT, 2018 ACRYLIC, OIL PASTEL, AND AEROSOL PAINT ON PANEL 14 x 11 INCHES LODGE, 2017 ACRYLIC AND OIL PASTEL ON PANEL 14 x 11 INCHES

6 HALF-LIFE, 2017 ACRYLIC, OIL PASTEL, AND COLOR PENCIL ON PANEL 10 x 8 INCHES MARINER, 2017 ACRYLIC, OIL PASTEL, AND COLOR PENCIL ON PANEL 14 x 11 INCHES

7 LOVED BY THE SUN, 2017 ACRYLIC, OIL PASTEL, AND AEROSOL PAINT ON PANEL 14 x 11 INCHES EXOSPHERE, 2016 ACRYLIC, AEROSOL PAINT, AND COLOR PENCIL ON PANEL 14 x 11 INCHES

8 GLYPH, 2018 ACRYLIC, AEROSOL PAINT, AND OIL PASTEL ON PANEL 24 x 18 INCHES SOLARIS II, 2016 ACRYLIC, OIL PASTEL, AND AEROSOL PAINT ON PANEL 12 x 9 INCHES

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12 BROOKE STROUD: NEW WORK 3 March 28 April, 2018 We watch. And along the way we collect our snapshots. Not with a camera but snagged in our memories, less than stories, mere fragments, the bits of the world we carry away often unknowingly until they resurface in daydreams and by happenstance. In considering the work of Brooke Stroud, it is these fragments a movie still, a color, a song, a texture that provide the ingredients of his sublime paintings. Titles provide clues Lodge, Solaris, Glyph, Telstar but games of spot-the-reference function only as evocative teasers, invitations to linger over their luxuriant surfaces and delve into their deeper intimations. References to iconic moments of abstract painting lend a familiarity to the work Newman zips, Rothko shadings, Malevich geometries and are easy to identify but again only suggest another facet of Stroud s recipe. Look closer and you ll find that the startling richness of his color palette is equally suggestive of medieval books of hours, small tomes for devotional practice full of miniature painted worlds in lapis blues, regal amethysts, and opulent golds. These paintings too are objects of contemplation, humming with quietude, pulsing with stillness. Let s return to the idea of the sublime and specifically its association with early 19th-century German Romantic painting for it is here that a more useful clue resides. So many of Stroud s paintings evoke landscapes and, like those of Caspar David Friedrich, reflect the artist s awe in the face of creation. Like Friedrich, Stroud paints not on a grand, heroic scale but intimately, vastness contained in a cabinet painting. Within narrow parameters, Stroud mines infinite variety: seascapes of boundless horizontality, glacial reliquaries, and galactic visions. In most, a form floats or sinks opens a window or streaks across the sky orienting the view like a figure in a landscape, Kubrick and Clarke s monolith as Campbell s Hero with a Thousand Faces. In all a vast encyclopedia of terrestrial, astral, and maritime views, the snapshots of Roy Batty who has seen things you people would not believe. It is within these unseen worlds, these fragments, these snapshots fusing into myriad wholes that the scope of Stroud s work makes its most lasting impressions. We ve found our way in by reference, allusion, familiarity, or the ineffable; we linger on that road pointed at the horizon, we stare out our airplane window as day turns to night, we fix our gaze upon the stars we forgot were there, we look through the portholes of Nemo s Nautilus. Like pages separated from a folio, collectively they offer a kind of travelogue, real and imagined, but nonetheless seen either way. Like the best of our own snapshots, they offer glimpses of wonder. Chris Ballou HIRAM BUTLER GALLERY 4520 BLOSSOM STREET HOUSTON TEXAS HIRAMBUTLER.COM