Art Rocks: Rick Brunner
On wood and seeing what's already there
Although St. Tammany artist Rick Brunner is renowned for the striking and beautiful sculptures he creates, he does not see himself as an inventer of forms, but rather as a discoverer of things that are already there. “I see myself as a bit of a found objects designer,” he noted. “I see things, and I borrow them. Working with wood, I might clean it up and sculpt it a bit, but Mother Nature made it; and you can’t ask for a better designer than Mother Nature.”
Brunner grew up in Chalmette in the ‘sixties, While all the other kids were playing football, he was off in the woods carving something. “Growing up I couldn’t spell ‘art,’ but I always had a pocket knife,” he recalled. At LSU and struggling with a psychology major, he took a painting class with the sole intention of getting his GPA up. And despite the fact that he didn’t do very well in the class, he saw his future.
“I’ve always been intimidated by color, and honestly, 2-D (two-dimensional art) is an illusion to me,“ he admitted. “But that painting class was when I realized that fine arts was going to be my thing. I went to the professor and asked to change my major. Then I took a ceramics class and it blew away my world. 3-D was my thing!” The ceramics class led to a graduate degree at Notre Dame doing pottery, which evolved into sculptural clay pieces, which got bigger and bigger until clay just got frustrating. “With ceramics, you get a lump of clay and you have to invent a form for it,” he noted. “With wood, the form is already there.” Brunner came back to Louisiana and, armed with a set of his grandfather’s tools, turned back to the woods.
Working from a hand-built studio on 140 wooded acres north of Covington, Brunner builds dramatic free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures as well as sculptural furniture pieces that retain echoes of the materials, and the environment, out of which they are born. Much of the oak, cherry, holly, sassafras, sweetgum, and pecan he uses is cut from the woods around his studio; and from it he builds sculptures that are simultaneously ancient and modern, skeletal and thrumming with life. They relate tales about the natural environment of South Louisiana, whispering secrets not only about this place’s fecundity, but also of the immense destructive power that lays it waste at all-too-regular intervals. After Hurricane Katrina flattened the tree cover on Brunner’s property in 2005, he spent six weeks with a portable sawmill, salvaging everything he could from the ravaged forest. “For a wood sculptor, Katrina was the worst of all things and the best of all things,” he admitted. “I have enough for two lifetimes.”
Although his work does incorporate elements of leather, rawhide, copper, and twine, ultimately each Rick Brunner sculpture is a homage to the wood. In each he works to highlight, rather than mask, the idiosyncrasies of color and grain that make each tree different from the next. Just like people, each tree has a personality of its own,” he said. “So when I set out to do a piece, I try to pick the piece of wood with the right personality to go into it.” Brunner noted that he has pieces of wood that he’s hung onto for twenty-five years but never used. “Other times I’ll wake up in the night and think, ‘That fifteen-year-old piece of walnut: that’s the one for this piece!’”
According to Brunner, in the late ‘eighties there were few custom furniture builders active in South Louisiana, although Baton Rouge had a few. “Me, Ford Thomas, Patrick Ricard—we were all buddies back then,” he noted, “and at that point I could sell furniture easier than I could sell sculpture.” He started showing sculptural furniture—”not pure utilitarian; a little more playful—” and was soon supplying galleries all over the country. The move to St. Tammany came in 1992, when Brunner took a chance on a patch of heavily forested land in Bush, hired a portable sawmill, and built a studio that was “… like a piece of furniture: down to the dovetails, mortise and tenon joints, and no nails in the frame at all.” With a studio in the forest and an inexhaustible supply of timber, Brunner met Susan Robin Lombard, a talented and ambitious interior designer, and the couple opened Brunner Gallery in Covington in 1997. They later expanded until they had gallery presences in Covington, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport and a thriving design business in Edwards, Colorado. Although they have scaled the gallery business back in recent years, Brunner’s work continues to evolve, and he continues to show and sell in galleries around the country.
Looking always to the landscape for material and inspiration, Brunner works in series formats. His Shields series derives from the forms of elephant ear plants growing outside his studio windows. “I was taken with the fact that the shape of the leaves looked like shields—like a defensive mechanism—but also like heart-shapes,” he explained. “Those multiple levels of meaning are interesting to me.” Pieces in his Vibrations series are delicate and graceful, featuring repeating ribbed elements that radiate out—suggestive of movement, or something skeletal, or perhaps both. He explained that the idea comes from attempting to express the elemental nature of movement itself. He watches moths attracted to the lights of his studio at night, or the ripples that spread across the surface of a pond after a stone is thrown, then he breaks the movement of each down so it can be considered frame by frame. “The point of the series was to bring these observations down to the basics of what I see in my mind when I look at things,” he said. He thought for a moment before adding, “But then, the harder you think about a piece, the less pure it becomes. Really, all you have to do is open up your eyes and see what’s around you.”
This month Rick Brunner will be the subject of a profile on LPB’s Art Rocks—the televised weekly showcase of Louisiana’s visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. For a look inside Brunner’s studio, tune in to Art Rocks on Friday, November 11 at 8:30 pm, repeating on Saturday, November 13 at 5:30 pm. lpb.org/artrocks.