The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage
Frank Bramblett
Visual Arts
2000 Grantee
Born 1947
Frank Bramblett’s pictures live in what art historian James Elkins might call an alchemical world of painting; at a crossroads between fluidity and fixity. Base material elevated to the status of “high art” is hardly news, but Bramblett’s art is not the facile alchemy of spinning straw into gold. It is more like an endless negotiation of the boundaries of each state. Mr. Bramblett’s prima materia includes not only paint, but concrete, silica, sponge, graphite, mirror, marble dust, money, and blown glass. He drills, flocks, scrawls, swirls, whips, beats and blends these elements into patterns that are remarkably open to interpretation. Concrete clouds float through diaphanous blue paint skies. Constellations of dots – which are in fact chemical equations or Braille notation – spiral into pictorial space. Whorls of paint resembling immense fingerprints describe an imagined topography. Like mercury, an essential ingredient in the alchemists’ cookbook, Mr. Bramblett’s works pulse with unexplainable life and appear to promise some hidden secret energy that cries out to be unlocked. Like the wayward, wandering alchemist, the artist searches through base materials for combinations of imagery and media that will yield new visual substances.
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