Bio
Gary Brewer is an artist, curator, writer, and collaborator living in Pasadena, with a studio in the historic Bendix Building in downtown Los Angeles. Self taught, in his current practice Brewer creates luminous, richly detailed oil paintings informed in part from his deep passion for nature, learning, and art history.
About
I was raised in California, first the Mojave Desert and then the Orange County coast. My fascination with the natural world began at an early age and I began to draw it. I had a natural gift for rendering. In high school I always had a sketchpad and pens close at hand and began drawing friends and my neighborhood. In my late teens I also began to focus on learning deeply about artists, art history, literature, and philosophy, checking out books from my local library. It was a period of self-education and also refining my art practice.
At the age of 21, after a brief and unfulfilling stint working in commercial illustration, I made a vow to spend the rest of my life pursuing my own art. I was determined to be a seeker, engaged in the pursuit of the sublime, which painting allowed me to endlessly explore.
At that time, my style was an eccentric abstraction, following the lead of Pollock, Rothko, Brice Marden, and others. A shift came in my late 30s, when I decided to paint a green bottle fly, inspired by a page of a natural history book. The realistically rendered painting, made in a day, began an entirely new body of work. Since this time, my focus has been the natural world. Living in the Oakland hills amongst a vast Redwood forest, my son collected natural objects on our walks: acorns, leaves, lichen, and moss. Looking under a magnifying glass I became fascinated with the complexity of forms and it stirred something both philosophically and creatively in me. It was an artistic breakthrough. Over the years I have been developing a biomorphic language of the sense of mystery expressed in organic forms.
Since the late 1980s my work has been in nearly a hundred group and solo exhibitions. The unconventional road to becoming an artist has added a depth of empathy for others. A proud accomplishment is becoming a mentor and professor. Since 2017 I have taught Intermediate Painting and Art History courses to a diverse group of young students at La Sierra University in Riverside. Recently, in January 2020, this led to organizing an exhibition at the University’s Brandstater Gallery featuring the works of four artists: Alison Saar, Iva Gueorguieva, Fatemeh Burnes, and Mei Xian Qiu. The decision to group these artists was in part inspired by the diversity of the University’s student body; I wanted to design an exhibition that communicated the importance of cultural variety to our national character.
Curation has been an essential part of my practice, since 1999 when I organized “THEM: Artists, Scientists and Designers Concerned with the Entomological Universe,” at SoMARTS, San Francisco. This led to another important exhibition: “The Age of Wonder: Artist’s Engaged with the Natural World,” at Turtle Bay Museum, in Redding. Since 2017 writing has been an equally important part of my practice. I have written extensively about artists, often in the form of in depth interviews and essays on their studio practice. To date there have been over 80 pieces published.
As an artist, curator, writer, and educator I am driven by inclusiveness, collaboration, and creating a sense of wonder and gratitude. Increasingly my studio practice is motivated by a passion for the preservation of the natural world and what we as artists can do to shape the course of its future. E.O. Wilson articulated in Future of Life that good intentions and regulations are not enough to protect the environment. Rather, artists, writers and thinkers must create new myths and stories to awaken a love for all living things. This ethos drives my work towards positive change.