Mapping Bruce

If someone looks around the piles of artwork and working drawings from my studio, they might think I could not figure out what kind of artist I wanted to be. At this time of my life, it feels important to stand back, look over what I have done, and ask myself if it is enough to build a life on. This artwork can roughly be divided into two groups–illustrations intended for publication and abstract paintings done simply for my satisfaction.

Inhale

Here is how it works, starting with the illustrations. These require a particular discipline and self-control because they have a specific job to do. They describe a place or thing in 2 dimensions. For example, an illustration of a bug for a book about natural history. It must be an accurate, closely observed bug. It cannot be how I feel about bugs or my particular mood that day. Illustration is not about the illustrator, it is exclusively about the object being illustrated. I call this part of the process inhale, observing and faithfully absorbing the complexity of the world.

Exhale

The next part of the process I call exhale. This is when the vivid images from illustrations, absorbed and marked in my imagination, mix and form something new. Eventually, all this visual material is transformed into complex abstract images. In contrast to the illustrations, these paintings are very much about how I feel and think and have limitless freedom. They only need to be faithful to the inspection that motivated them. Painting a leaf and discovering an abstract form in it, making an abstract calligraphic line and seeing the movements of a dancer, it is the balance of these two processes that motivate all of this artwork.

Map Making

Quite a few years ago, I was drinking coffee in a coffee shop in Singapore with a friend who happened to be a book editor. He asked me if I had experience making illustrations, and I said yes (even though I had never made an illustration). Then he asked me if I had experience making maps. And again I said yes (again a gentle deception).

Well, my ruse worked out. After about one month, I was on my way to Thailand and a large project making illustrations and maps. I received an offer for my next book, a guidebook to Bali, and it went relatively well.
I had a good amount of time before this one began, enough to study illustration and map making (and to make me an honest man!).

This is one of my first attempts to make a complete Bali Map. The publisher said the mountains were ok, but the roads looked like toothpaste squeezed from a tube. I pointed out that the shape of the book made it impossible to fit the map accurately; it would require stretching the map like rubber to fit on the page. I thought that the topography of Bali deserved a large format map, not a rubberized one!

Map Making before GPS

So I set off to create this map and right away faced a common problem— how to get accurate topographic info. Remember, this was before GPS software, as it was like many digital tools we can’t imagine living without. Luckily, a friend gave me the Dutch topographic charts that were surveyed in 1928. These were very important; it is possible this project would have been impossible without them.

These charts were so large, that they were able to include a lot of features, for example, stone walls, graveyards, and seasonal rivers. One feature that caught my eye was an indication of walking paths, the networks of paths that outlined the topography. Most of these paths are still here, just in the form of asphalt roads in use today.

As mentioned before, life was largely manual, not yet digital. So, working with simple tools, I produced. Back when the project was in its early progress, I had some dark thoughts that I had bitten off more than I could chew, that the project was more than I could handle. As I drove from the mountain to the ocean, I sketched interesting places and noted my impressions along the way. One night, I stayed up late to see what I had produced and was surprised to see that I had enough material to produce two projects— in other words, I was making a map and a book.

Parkinson’s Disease

These three paintings show how PD (Parkinson’s Disease) has affected my painting style in surprising and intriguing ways. This first painting, Whirl 03, shows how much control I was able to maintain over this painting style. Labyrinth shows the effect of PD 15 years later. Certainly, the lines are not as steady, but I was to see how expressive they are. The tremors in my right hand are not just haphazard shaking, they are more like oscillations that have a definite pattern and rhythm.

These oscillations are seen clearly within the calligraphic lines of this piece, cross-crossing the forms, suggesting radial marks. This piece looks like it has been drawn over with a pencil to create the illusion of a 3-dimensional form. But actually, this illusion is a by-product of the process of the piece.

I realised that only someone with PD could create calligraphic lines like these, so I have decided to explore some ways to use my tremor as an artistic tool, and I intend to turn the liability of PD into a new technique of artistic expression.

The final painting, Strange Mood In Funky Town, shows a PD image made up of 4 vertical lines to create a field. The black paint I used in this painting developed bubbles as it dried, not part of my plan. I embrace the surprises that come as I gain more experience with this approach!

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