We recently connected with Jamie Brunson and have shared our conversation below.

Jamie, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I could go all the way back to elementary school, when I colored and drew, constantly! I grew up in a military family, so I spent an influential part of my childhood living in Japan. We were stationed outside of Tokyo and later in Yokohama. We didn’t have American television–although we had a theater that screened English-language American movies. So, as children, we spent a lot of time reading, making art, acting out the roles from the library books we’d read or the 1960s films we had seen– James Bond spy stories, big gladiator epics, cowboy movies. Having to be resourceful in that way was very conducive to creativity; I think living outside of American popular culture, and being exposed at a young age to Japan’s refined aesthetics, was a powerful formative experience.
My parents divorced when I was young and my mother remarried, so I would spend summers in the San Francisco Bay Area with my “other family.” My mother’s second husband and his brother were both artists. During the summers, I lived in, literally, a kind of beatnik scenario. Artists and art students would hang out at my mother’s house; there were people sitting around on the living room floor while jazz played on the stereo. People sketched, played music–the artists always looked like they were having a good time. I already loved drawing, so that scenario was a fairly persuasive case for pursuing the arts.

Jamie, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My degrees are in painting, but I’ve held many different jobs in the art world in the course of my career as an exhibiting artist. I worked early on as a gallery assistant, then started writing audioguide manuscripts–that was a great job, flying around the country to different museums, interviewing curators for recorded content, doing research. That lead to writing art criticism and working as an editor at a West Coast art publication. Later, I taught for many years, from graduate level seminars to continuing education studio courses. All of these jobs were interesting because they fed different parts of my personality and allowed me to develop different skill sets–but their primary purpose was to support my studio practice as a painter. Working in these different parts of the fine arts industry gave me a lot of insight into how institutions in the art world functioned. Back when I was working in all these areas, artists mainly relied on gallery representation to sell their work–it was a more passive role. But that model has changed radically with the advent of the internet: Facebook and Instagram, personal websites, digital marketing, and virtual galleries. It’s much easier to be self-representing and to create your own brand and identity now. Before I retired from teaching, to paint full-time, I created a consulting company offering professional development coaching for visual artists. There are countless businesses doing this now, but I was on the ground floor, just as artists were moving from physical slides to digital documentation of their work, and just beginning to build websites to showcase their work. Because I’d worked in so many parts of the art world, and made so many connections as an exhibiting artist, critic, researcher, independent curator, and teacher, I could put all the parts together and take emerging artists through the steps of developing their careers, in an accelerated way. Again, I did all of this to support my own studio work!

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

I’ve been involved in meditation practice for most of my adult life, and it plays a large part in my creative work. Being involved in meditation means being observant, fully occupying the present. This is difficult to do– but over time, the discipline of practice builds qualities like resilience, awareness and compassion, in the same way that showing up in the studio builds material craftsmanship over time.
My work as painter and collage artist is to witness external events–like seasonal changes, shifts in light and atmosphere–and to observe physical locations in the real world–equally in urban settings and at sacred structures at historic sites, like churches, ruins, temples– and to reinterpret them formally, an act of translation.
I’m not interested in making illustrations, but rather, in making formal representations that transcribe physical and sensate experiences into the formal vocabulary of shape, color, interval, contrast, texture, surface and so forth. In creating a formal language for different states and experiences that happen in real time in the world and in deep meditation, my goal for my work is to make art that functions like a threshold for the viewer, inviting them to slow down and enter a more contemplative state.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

I think a big job of the institutional art world–by this I mean museums and university and commercial galleries–is to develop publicly accessible arts education programming. Most of the museums I know, work really hard at this–with family days, hands-on art workshops, gallery talks, and a lot of peripheral social programming, just to get people into the building, who aren’t the usual art-consumer audience. Exposure to, and knowledge of, any kind of esoteric or elite subculture always makes it more engaging and less intimidating. The truly great thing about art is that it’s directly tied to so many aspects of culture–the economy of any era, the social politics and religion, the technology of any given period. Once you begin to understand that, you see how art is woven into the fabric of civilization.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most people who work in the arts–music, theatre, film, dance, the visual arts–are compelled, maybe even a obsessed, by a certain kind of vision or ideal. Even if someone has never felt drawn to the traditional fine arts, there’s a chance that they’ve been attracted to a popular-culture equivalent of painting, or theater, or ballet, or sculpture. It could be something like a sport, or building model trains, or pro-wrestling, or digital games. When you recognize that feeling of identifying with a subject, and being completely immersed in a process or practice, you can start to understand the motivation that compels people to want to make art, to be surrounded by it, to understand it’s movements, history and terminology.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.jamiebrunson.com/
• Instagram: @jamiebrunsonpainter

Image Credits

Photos courtesy of: Dana Davis (Prop, Twirl); Kim Richardson (Lamy Summer, Precinct), Mark Petrick (Territory), Sky Graphics (Turiya)