By April Gornik
Guest
Columnist
North
Haven, Long Island, NY, USA
Bryan Hunt is best known as an
award-winning sculptor whose work has been commissioned for and bought by both
public and private installations around the world. In 2014, he was commissioned
to create a sculpture, entitled Axis Mundi, for the new One World Trade
Center in New York City. He is also a painter and ceramicist, and a fellow New
Yorker. I visited with him at his studio for this Conversation.
APRIL GORNIK: You worked at NASA in
Florida in your early 20s. How did that impact your work? Were you already an
artist when you worked there?
BRYAN HUNT: Just imagine, the late
sixties, Cocoa Beach, being engineer’s aide at Kennedy Space Center, surfing
and painting, being a wanna-be Picasso!
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| Bryan Hunt |
To witness Saturn V rocket
launches, to be a minuscule part of the Apollo program and the Moon Landing …
damn good times! The impact on me was the message that anything is possible.
After two years at Kennedy Space Center I moved to Los Angeles to go to art
school.
APRIL GORNIK: Some of your earliest
work dealt with architecture (the Empire State Building, the Great Wall). Did
you ever want to pretend, in the immortal words of George Costanza from Seinfeld,
to be an architect?
BRYAN HUNT: I was pretty good at
pretending when I was a kid, after all, pretending is an exercise of the
imagination and it nurtures creativity.
I had thoughts of being an
architect but it wasn’t my forte. I did love the drawing and design side of it,
but not the numbers and the rules. I felt that making art would make me
happier, I had no idea of where being an artist would lead me or how I would
survive, but that uncertainty didn’t bother me.
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| Empire State with Graf |
APRIL GORNIK: Do you think
sculpture is like architecture, and vice versa? If so, how?
BRYAN HUNT: Very different worlds.
One is a functional form (more or less), the other the embodiment of meaning.
Today, in the digital-driven world,
architecture has been liberated with new methods of construction and new
materials that can dazzle and have a sculptural feel ... and it’s a building!
For instance, Frank Gehry and Rem Koolhaus. Sculpture, on the other hand, if it
uses digital processes of fabrication, it seems to lose something ... like it’s
soul. It is seductive in a sort of effortlessness and presence, but I like
things that reveal their inherent history of process, substance and touch.
APRIL GORNIK: Is there a dialogue
now in your work between the built and the natural? After you did your earlier
architecturally-referential work you started doing all your wonderfully
disembodied, or should I say embodied, freestanding waterfalls and lakes. How
do they relate to the earlier work?
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| Fall Lake Falls |
BRYAN HUNT: Most of the 70’s
“built” pieces are from a group I called “monuments and wonders.” They were
basically the making of scaled versions of iconic structures like the Tower of
Babel, the Wall of China, and the Hoover Dam. I was indulging in the
three-dimensional object removed from its location and landscape.
The lakes and waterfalls came
afterwards. I made them with plaster and wax then cast them into bronze. The
water and its fluid energy morphs into a bronze figure with an autonomous life
within a place of its own.
APRIL GORNIK: At the same time as
your waterfall sculptures, you were making “airships”, which harken to your
flight-related passion. They seem like your most consistent self-expression.
What do they mean to you now after all these versions?
BRYAN HUNT: I’d say the “airship”
form is a metaphysical, gravity-defying vessel of contemplation. It takes on
many shapes and many metallic colors, the constant being that the airships
buoyantly cantilever high above your head as if in flight. They’re made of
balsa wood and silk paper and are tethered to a point on the wall.
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| Airship |
In general, Air, Water, Mass,
Energy, Gravity, Space in the form of sculpture and sometimes painting – these
are my concerns, with the possibility of taking you somewhere (conceptually)
APRIL GORNIK: Can you talk more
about your paintings, and how they differ from your sculpture? You use
wonderful collage in the most recent of them.
BRYAN HUNT: I like an excuse to
paint. When I undertake a large sculpture, I usually make a full scale drawing
to figure out structurally how it will stand and where the center of
gravity is. I draw the front, side, and top views with charcoal on canvas and
in places I will overlap the “views” so I use oil-stick to highlight and
separate the lines and before you know it I’m throwing in acrylic washes
to activate the space the lines are in or on – all to get the drawing to act
like a painting.
The most recent paintings come from
drawing celestial orbs on 10ft.-square canvases. I was thinking more of a
dome or a cap of an orb or asteroid-like thing as a sculpture relief hanging
on the wall, bulging into the room, like it’s a sphere stuck between the inside
and the outside.
The paintings I made for these
“domes” are renditions of abstract topographical other-worldly landscapes. They
are map-like with loose mark-making that flow from crater regions to
valleys to sea beds, etc.
I sometimes collage photos of the
clay surfaces that I have made to add a dimension of shadow and light as if
this place is star lit with a potential of life. These paintings are sort of
unfinished and in process, with notations and glyphs like a page in a giant
book or traveler's journal, and they guide me in the making of the
sculpture.
I like that Matisse made a
sculpture, then made a painting to put it into. So this can go both ways. Ha!
APRIL GORNIK: You’re one of those
“true” artists whose heads are always kind of in the clouds, but you’re
actually more in outer space. Lately you’ve been inventing lunar bodies and
surfaces, which I love. How did that work evolve?
BRYAN HUNT: I’d say that after
sculpting earth features and forms like lakes, waterfalls, flumes, rivers,
craters, and canyons the next step would have to be extraterrestrial landscapes
where things are different. After all, there are a gazillion variations of the
orb and millions of earths in different stages of time. The images and data
that's coming back from our space probes is astonishing and inspiring, very
abstract, and yet familiar.
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| Sea of Nectar |
The pure science of space
exploration is what defines us humans in the here and now. We find words to
describe it, and we find ways to bring it into our culture.
APRIL GORNIK: Your work in ceramic
is some of the most magical stuff I know: Moons turn into little three-legged
creatures, and there’s an absolutely wonderful animation about them. Are you an
anime/animation fan? Is this something you think about, or did it just evolve?
BRYAN HUNT: The ceramic moons are like
souvenirs from a long trip “abroad”, similar to the maps and globes brought
back by early explorers. Some I put legs on to give them a little humanity and
the lightness of being. It’s important (helpful) to be playful and step out of
the science, and that frees up the form and the mark-making. After all, there
are no rules in art.
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| Plutonian Dwarf - 2015 |
APRIL GORNIK: You’re always had (wonderful)
dogs since I’ve known you. Sculpture is like leaving the biggest paw print you
can when you make art. Do you think of your hands or your whole arms making
your big sculptures? How does your body figure in (pun intended)?
BRYAN HUNT: I was told a story
about de Kooning that, when making his clam-digger sculptures in clay, he wore
clam-shuckers’ gloves over his hands, even another glove over the other to
enlarge his gestures and marks! Those sculptures are so out there, so full of
life, so oddly perfect. They are as if you are looking at a figure as it is
reflected in the water that it is standing in. This was a revelation to me
about inventing ways to make things.
And talk about paw prints, yes, I’m
hands-on too.
APRIL GORNIK: You’ve been all over
the world, and now you live out here on the East End of Long Island. Has living
here affected your work?
BRYAN HUNT: How could it not! The
East End has so much to offer. Artists have been coming out this way since the
days of Thomas Moran and Fairfield Porter, de Kooning etc. It is a way to be
near the activities of NYC but living in extraordinary nature by the sea with
estuaries and farm fields. There’s something wonderful about converting a barn
into a studio. I lived in the city in the 80’s and 90’s and it couldn’t have
been a better time, but now I prefer the seasonal cycles and working with the
big doors wide open.
Links:
Bryan Hunt
April Gornik
Links:
Bryan Hunt
April Gornik
_______________________________
April Gornik is best known for
her landscape paintings. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern
Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art and many
significant private collections. She has been awarded the Lifetime Achievement
in the Arts Award from Guild Hall Academy of the Arts and the Award of
Excellence for Artistic Contributions to the Fight Against AIDS from amfAR.