I first got to know Bruce Thorn
after I reviewed his show at the Koehnline Museum in 2015
Bruce Thorn, Nightsong (detail)
Above is a detail from the painting that blew me away.
God knows how he gets that much rapturous intensity into a painting.
I couldn't get it out of my mind - so this year I asked to buy it.
Bruce Thorn: Night Watch
Sadly, Nightsong had already been sold -- but Night Watch was available
so now I am its proud owner.
Bruce's paintings are so weird and dense,
every time I look, it feels like a first viewing.
Bruce Thorn : The Red Guitar
Recently, he finished a much larger painting, "The Red Guitar" and sent me a photo,
probably suspecting that I would be as thrilled by it as he.
He was right.
It's like a view of the cosmos: scary, infinite, unpredictable,
wonderful, never ending.
It belongs in a shrine for the worship of the universe.
Kandinsky would have recognized a soul mate.
He then he invited me to view it in his studio
Bruce works a lot with surface texture, so photographs are really inadequate.
Here's another piece in his studio that I really like.
If it were a QR code
it might link to some divinity’s home page
Perhaps Loki ?
Mark Tobey, Pacific Transition, oil on paper, 1943
Mark Tobey, Advance of History, 1964, gouache on paper
Mark Tobey, Night Flight, lithograph, 1975
Bruce told me how important Mark Tobey had been to him.
Obviously there is a resemblance
in how they compulsively cover an empty canvas
like monks filling in the margins of a manuscript.
I'm sure I've seen Tobey pieces in art museums or Art Expo,
but I've yet to see one that thrilled me enough to put it into my camera.
It seems that Tobey was more interested in design variety
than in making something spectacular
while Bruce seems driven by some kind of religious fervor
as if the universe needed him to finish a painting
in order to keep on expanding second by second.
BTW - here’s a recent photo of the great beyond.
It does kinda resemble Red Guitar.
It's no coincidence that some of his marks recall Arabic calligraphy;
he spent some of his youth in Muslim Africa.
Here are some more views of work in his home and studio
Some of it is unfinished:
As you can see, there is some variety in Bruce's paintings
and that variety is even greater if we include his older work.
I doubt he knows what a painting will eventually look like when he starts it.
He's an explorer
and often explorers discover lands
that few others would like to visit.
That may be why he has had some difficulty
finding representation in commercial galleries.
The neck of a guitar enters the lower right corner of the above photograph,
reminding us that Bruce is also a musician.
Art history tells us that melomania was common among leading French painters of the 19th century as the music of Beethoven, Wagner, and earlier classical masters could be heard in public concert halls rather than just courtly salons. What a thrill it must have been to hear this music live back before recordings were available.
Shah Mosque, Isfahan, 17th Century
Beauford Delaney, 1954, oil on raincoat
Just as with Thorn and Tobey,
individual forms are overwhelmed by the space between them
in the two examples shown above.
There is no figure and ground,
just one all encompassing pattern.
In the Persian ceiling, that pattern feels as precise
and intellectually challenging as a differential equation.
In the Delaney piece, it feels like an ecstatic,
though only momentary, burst of joy.
In the Tobey, it feels like a specimen
in a collection of biological material,
like butterfly wings or pressed leaves.
In Thorn's "Red Guitar", it feels like the evolving universe:
ever emerging and ever dying,
an eternal interaction between disruption and convergence.
