DANIEL BRUGGEMAN
This book is dedicated to Mary, August, Lucien and Emma
For our Grandchildren, present and future
It took leaving his native Nebraska and arriving in New York City for my father to discover his most enduring muse, the midwestern landscape. The Dutch masters in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Natural History’s less-heralded diorama backdrops inspired him to revisit the terrain of his youth. His early works, Bruggeman joked at the time, existed somewhere in Central Park, between the two exalted hubs of art and science.
That was 1983. In the decades since, a quintessential Bruggeman would feature finely tuned birches and pines wedged between sweeping, cloud-streaked skies and ominously barren foregrounds. Meticulous to the point of obsession, the details will fix your gaze. But linger long enough and you might stumble upon abstract reflections in the water or sky that reveal even more.
Eerie man-made features punctuate these paintings – agents of the human presence against an otherwise pastoral backdrop. Rollercoasters rise above treetops, couches decay in a clearing. The result is a meditation on “the place in nature where humans and the environment interact,” Bruggeman told a documentarian in 2015. Stylistically representational, these works grapple with a dark tension: the threat humans pose to nature and vice versa.
The human presence, felt but never seen, encourages the viewer to draw their own conclusions – a sort of choose-your-own adventure where each painting offers up the stage set and props, but no discernable characters or plot. Omissions on the canvas grant viewers license to write their own story. Short of that, they’re still remarkably attractive to the eye.
What is unavoidable in all these works, however, is the sense that nature, in all its power, will eventually win out. So many of Bruggeman’s contemporary works draw from his visits to Minnesota’s north woods, a place as desolate and wild as any, where human vulnerabilities come sharply
into relief. That sentiment tends to give these paintings an unsettling edge: nature might very well have the final word. But in the meantime, what recourse does it have for human manipulation?
Despite his well-established extroversion, my father rarely talks about his work, particularly its conceptual underpinnings. When he does, he tends to describe them as melancholic. Certainly, such vivid impressions of our changing climate can and should evoke melancholy. And yet, to me, these paintings are some of his most beautiful.
Bruggeman thinks deeply about his paintings. If ekphrasis is the written expression evoked by viewing a piece of art, my father engages in something like the opposite, rendering the essence of Jane Bennett’s writings on Vibrant Matter, Nietzsche’s observations about nature, and the German thinker W.G. Sebald on “melancholia.” He leaves nothing to chance, choreographing the canvas before laying down a speck of paint.
I don’t think of my father’s work – or my father, for that matter – as particularly dark or downtrodden. In fact, each of his paintings, even the spooky ones, highlight the beauty of the natural world. After all, as Sebald writes, melancholy has a fundamentally uplifting definition: “the contemplation of the dismal plight we are in … contains the possibility of overcoming it.”
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Lucien Bruggeman
INTRODUCTION
Start by asking, what is a line? Wrong question. Rather, what is color? Because color comes first, the prehistoric faith, before we took up the exacting religion of making shapes out of lines. Remember? The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep…. God said, “Let there be light”….and the light was good.
So begin with color.
Blue makes the first claim—you’re always looking up, drawn to the unlikely marine light of heaven, watching it turn pink, orange, violet. So many tricks sky has. Stay out late, and you’ll see how it closes its palm (that’s night). Often you notice the intricate basting threads of light up there in the dark. Or the big white cheese, round or slivered. Some nights it melts across the span of dark. Or clouds do.
Still, you must acknowledge—blue is also water, the main thing down here. Water connects everything (boats on rivers, ships across seas). But then you remember, regretfully, water is also the great divider—of land, of us. So blue must be taken very seriously, above us, all around us. The one color where you can drown.
This you try to keep in mind, in the mind’s eye where you live and breathe. Where you labor, though you don’t care for that word. Say, instead, where you gaze. Where you persist.
That’s where the line comes in, godlike in its stealthy way. Verticals in particular—trees, massed and orderly, in their civic accord, tall canopies sheltering the shoots and saplings rooted beneath the ancient dark, the evergreen. Sometimes there are habitations, tender and small, wedged between the blue and green. That’s heartbreaking. All this must be drawn. And we are drawn into it, into it all.
Landscape it’s called. This is the world given to us long ago, the embrace of light and line, of color and shape.
What, all this asks, would happen if we really loved the world?
Patricia HamplOn to green. It’s a matter of life and death, green. It’s where we live. Green, so buoyant, is deeply married to moody girl brown, an unlikely but true love (soil, mud, rock). That’s probably why the old language insisted that we are to husband the land. Care for it. That was the first idea. Actually, a command.
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MAKE OF IT WHAT YOU WILL
Faiths Resevoir oil on linen 36”x 72” 1997 10
11
36”x 72” 2014 12
Buck Hill acrylic on linen
13
Stadium acrylic on linen 36”x 36” 2013 14
15
36”x 37” 2014 16
The End acrylic on linen
17
2013 18
Park 1 acrylic on linen 36”x 36”
19
Park 2
acrylic on linen
32 x 32”
20
2014
21
Park 3
acrylic on linen
36”x 36”
22
2015
23
Buck Hill 2
acrylic on linen
36”x 36”
24
2016
25
Faiths
Resevoir
on linen 36”x 36”
26
(Westbound) acrylic
2015
Faiths Resevoir (Eastbound)
27
acrylic on linen 36”x 36” 2015
2015 28
Playground acrylic on linen 36”x 36”
29
Falls acrylic on linen 40 x 30”
30
2014
31
Overlook acrylic on
32 x 64” 2015 32
linen
33
Airshow Incident, Pilot Survives and Walks Away
watercolor on paper
2016
20 x 20”36
37
The Tears Started In My Eyes 1 watercolor on paper 20 x 20” 2016 38
39
Park 4
watercolor on paper
40
42 x 42” 2017
41
Home Ablaze
2018 42
Vacation
watercolor on paper 42 x 42”
43
watercolor
42
2018 44
The Maiden’s Ascent
and gouache on paper
x 42”
45
From Voids That Are Never Empty (study)
watercolor and gouache on paper 20 x 20”
2016
46
47
The Incredulity
48
watercolor and gouache on paper 20 x
20” 2016
49
Red Couch (study)
watercolor and gouache on paper
20 x 20”
2016
50
51
Raft (Red)
watercolor and gouache on paper
20 x 30”
54
2020
55
Raft (Yellow)
watercolor and gouache on paper
20 x 30”
56
2020
57
Raft (Red)
watercolor and gouache on paper
20 x 30”
58
2020
59
The Gravity of a Fading Summer watercolor and gouache on paper 30 x 20” 2020 60
They did not hear the soft, melodious notes and quiet clicks of the wintering birds (study) watercolor and gouache on paper
30 x 20”
2020
61
We were struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the everyday watercolor and gouache on paper 30 x 20”
2020
62
The Impermanence of July Evening watercolor and gouache on paper
30 x 20”
2020
63
Of summer weight sweaters
watercolor and gouache on paper
30 x 20”
64
2020
The feather drifted silently to Earth as though it meant something (study) watercolor and gouache on paper
30 x 20”
2020
65
From Voids That Are Never Empty watercolor and gouache on paper 42 x 42” 2016 66
67
Red Couch
watercolor and gouache on paper
42 x 42”
68
2017
69
The lightning bugs hung in the air like a halo watercolor and gouache on paper
22
2020
x 30”70
71
Woman (and Task)
watercolor and gouache on paper
42 x 42”
74
2022
75
The Prairie’s Dreaming Sod watercolor and gouache on paper 42 x 42” 2018 76
77
The feather drifted silently to earth as though it meant something watercolor and gouache on paper
42 x 42”
2020
78
79
Blue Wood 2
watercolor and gouache on paper
42 x 42”
80
2020
81
Airport Road
watercolor and gouache on paper
42 x 42”
2021
84
85
The Perfect Shape of Our Absence
watercolor and gouache on paper 42 x 42”86
2022
87
2022
The Heavens (a Hard Chink; also a Thin Slurred Tseet) watercolor and gouache on paper 30 x 22”88
89
The Heavens (a Wheezy Querulous Twee and a Short Vit)
30 x 22”
watercolor and gouache on paper90
2022
91
The Heavens (a Squeaky Metallic Kick or Eek)
watercolor and gouache on paper
30 x 22”
2022
92
93
When Great Trees Fall watercolor and gouache on paper
2022
30 x 42”94
95
Blue Wood (and Then They Stopped)
watercolor and gouache on paper
30 x 42”
96
2020
97
The Perfect Shape of Our Absence (1)
watercolor and gouache on paper 30 x 42”98
2022
99
The Perfect Shape of Our Absence (2)
watercolor and gouache on paper 30 x 42”100
2022
101
An Annunciation
watercolor and gouache on paper 20 x 16”102
2022
103
Superior (road)
watercolor and gouache on paper
42 x 42”
104
2023
105
108
Special thanks to:
Lucien Bruggeman
Patricia Hampl
Groveland Gallery
Sally Johnson
Andrea Bubula
Petronella Ytsma
Book Design: Margaret Lindahl
Images Copyright c 2023 Daniel Bruggeman
Introduction Copyright c 2023 Lucien Bruggeman
Foreward Copyright c 2023 Patricia Hampl
Installation Photos Copyright c 2021 Rik Sferra
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the artist.
ISBN - 979-8-3507-1113-4
Printed by: Engage Print
For more information on Daniel Bruggeman and his artwork, please contact Groveland Gallery: www.groveland gallery.com
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