Artist Statement

Steuart Bremner______________________________________
P.O. Box 2999  Breckenridge, CO 80424   art@unsafeart.com

 

A lot of contemporary post-modernist artwork is confusing and alienating, and worse, very self-serving to the artist. My work is not derivative representations of reality, but my images are graspable, have a level of understanding that’s easy to accept and several others that allow the viewer to take off and get to a more complex, more obscure, quality of meaning.

I think that throughout the history of art, the role of the artist has been to point to order amid the seeming chaos. I really don’t believe the world is chaos. Nature is very organized. Art that remains full of randomness isn’t getting to the essence of why we’re making art. Understanding the order, the relationships between objects, is very important to me.

I enjoy using things that are vital to life today. When I include a pencil or a penny or a river rock in my work everyone can relate to it – it’s realism. But following that recognition, a viewer can see that where I place this recognizable object is important to the piece as a whole.

Cezanne said painting was "thinking with a brush.” For me, sculpture is thinking with tweezers. My mental tweezers carefully place things ‘in’, but more importantly, removing things, plunk out the leaf or the hair on a photograph to communicate clearly. All the right things are in the piece and only the right things.

© Steuart Bremner, 2005.