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The Wedding Present
Featured Artist:
Kathleen Bryson
I was born in 1968 and raised in Alaska. When I was 18, I moved to Sweden to study archeology, followed by long stints in Seattle and London. As a novelist, actor and indie filmmaker, I see myself as being outside the mainstream. I like the underground. I like subculture. I am self-taught and, due to my painting style and the subject matters I choose to explore, I am usually classified by others as an "outsider artist". I, however, rarely see myself as belonging to one school, and my stuff always contains more exceptions to any given rule than the rule itself.
I don't do commercial art.
I do highly textured mixed-media pieces. I use wet and dry ingredients, and I usually draw on a painting as well as using brushwork. In days when I was very broke during the Seattle recession of the early 1990s, I frequently used type-correcting fluid in lieu of white paint, and I nearly always painted on cardboard. Quite early on (I am 36 years old at present), I began the Bitch series: 13 paintings about mythic wicked females. I also undertook what I considered to be a series of "blasphemous" paintings. Soon after I became interested in the concept of Hybrid Vigor: the idea that by mixing, organisms become stronger. Alongside more visionary-and-dream-based paintings that didn't fit neatly into any sequence, I worked through a second series: boychicks, werewolves, cyborgs, "chumanpanzees" and other lovelies. It is no coincidence that a great deal of blurring occurs between the subjects of hybridism, spirit and the monstrous feminine: my boychick cruises for sex by a chapel in Nunhead Cemetery; all my monstresses are hybrids, too (mermaids, gorgons etc.); works such as the sheela-na-gig and the banshee are in constant dialogue with the strictures of organized religion, even if that dialogue is, at times, a spit in the face. The themes remain the same: subversion, mixing, enchantment.
Sheela-na-gig
Here are some more particular ideas about my stuff. Alaska, you see, is a wilderness full of magic. Spirits live in the trees; creepy insects crawl around the forest floor. Nothing is safe, but everything is exciting. My Alaskan heritage has contributed to my general interest in the magical, the numinous, the unsafe. My strong dislike of dichotomies and polarizations is one of the many reasons I am attracted to hybridism theory and to subversion itself. My paintings too are always skewed, knocked off their sacred-cow pedestals, such as my Upside-Down Eden or my festering Strange Fruit. I have painted four-foot razor-sharp vagina dentatas, Russian Orthodox churches, sublime demons, decadent angels, dangerous sheep, the snaggle-toothed and terrifying worlds of ugly monsters and more monsters. I have used Mixed Media in an extended meaning: saliva, lipstick, acrylics, oils, nail polish, glitter-glue, White-Out, pen & ink, perfume, enamel, pastels, house paint, photocopies, needles, fake fur, barbed wire, baubles, poster paint, wax, cardboard and bindi. And other substances. (From 1990-2000, most materials were found--except for the White-Out, which was usually stolen from various temp jobs.) I have explored questions of ugliness and beauty, evil and goodness and eventually dismissed all predictable oppositional positioning. I have measured objects by odd bumblebee standards - the standard by which objects are measured in air, the three dimensions in which a bee flies, things intangible such as air and movement and free will. I have painted trees and snow when they were the only part of the world from 2000-2005 that I could represent with any joy. These are the ideas I have previously explored in my work.
Another thing the casual observer might clock on regarding my paintings--particularly those in the Hybrid Vigor series--is that I have constructed some unlikely parings of environment and subject. The main character of a given work often appears to be in the "wrong" environment, such as the "chumanpanzee" at the Giant's Causeway, the transvestite licking the Alaska State Highway, the cyborg lying prone in the snowy forest. There are five good reasons for this, but I'm not revealing them here. But I will say that I'm not sure I believe in the "wrong" environments. If you are from a place where nature reigns, then you know well that there are no strict categories and that everything leaks into everything else; you find out that beauty lies not only in perfection but also in difference.
Dream in Alaska
Currently I am painting ghosts. I have stopped depicting things which are hybrid and therefore both, and am painting things which are half: Schroedinger's almost-there cat, for example, in vaporous glow-in-the-dark paleness, stalking Stravinsky's bird in a fairy-tale wood, the bird guarding a nest of Russian nesting-doll eggs. Or the Hen of Possible-When, or the Man Who Wasn't There, or that old postcard joke of a Ghost in the Snow. The world feels terribly ghostly just now. Or perhaps it feels terribly solid. Like Schroedinger's Cat, the world and my unlikely subjects seem as equally possible as impossible. It makes me look for divination, for Tarot cards. If I were a weaker or perhaps more trusting person, it would make me accept organized religion. But I want the fog-ly magic of augurism that I can interpret. I want suggestions, not certainties.
My most recent show was called Lucky Charms. Here and here and here are some of the reviews for it.
Luck and charm are things that ease your way; I've depended on them more than once myself, but it's always been the Holly Golightlyesque kindness-of-strangers, and friends, more than Vegas-style chance or charisma, that has saved me personally from disappearing and fading like Schroedinger's Cat might, or might not. If you have to add a new trinket to your charm bracelet, the kindness of strangers and friends is the bauble you want.
Whether its manifestation is a St. Christopher's medal, a lucky coin, a rabbit foot, someone else's silent blessing or an overleafed-overlooked clover, in this Bush-infested world we could all use such lucky charms to guide us through. We could use them right about now.
KATHLEEN BRYSON
July 1, 2005
[To see the paintings in this issue in finer
detail, click once on the image and a new page will open, and then click on
the "expando-box" in the image for full resolution.]
An Eclipse Turns Above St. Wilgefortis,
Also Called Uncumber, a Citizen of Nature's Own DragKingdom
All the paintings shown in this edition of Suspect Thoughts Journal are already sold, with the exception of "The Hairy Fishwife", "The Anorexic Werewolf (Hunger) Strikes Again", "Sheela-na-gig" and "An Eclipse Turns Above St. Wilgefortis, Also Called Uncumber, a Female Citizen of Nature's own DragKingdom".
If you would like to buy "Sheela-na-gig", please call the Pegasus Gallery at (541) 757-0042.
If you would like to buy any of the other three originals, or prints of ANY of the 17 paintings shown here, or commission a new painting, please email Kathleen.
email Kathleen Bryson
visit the Kathleen Bryson editor webpage
visit the Kathleen Bryson website
All Paintings © 1991-2003 Kathleen Bryson
The work featured in this journal is under copyright protection
by the individual authors and artists and may not be duplicated
or reprinted without their permission.
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