BRUCE THORN


 

"Bruce's paintings are so weird and dense, every time I look, it feels like a first viewing. It's like a view of the cosmos: scary, infinite, unpredictable, wonderful, never ending. It belongs in a shrine for the worship of the universe. Kandinsky would have recognized a soul mate."

 

-Chris Miller, Sept. 4, 2021

 Mountshang Blogspot

 

 

"Change, mutation, and evolution-from the cellular to the global move us forward, whether we like it or not. So it is with Thorn's paintings, seething masses of interlocking, intermingling shapes that appear to pulse, breathe, throb, squirm, and spark as their moving parts repeat and amend themselves. The paintings look like samples captured on slides and seen under a microscope, making us think this same liveliness continues ad infinitum off stage, off canvas. Thorn's shapes and marks appear to derive from nature, whether inspired by lightning bolts or eels in a tide pool. Some paintings look like magnified cross sections of rocks or sediment, while others recall something seen through an electron microscope: droplets of pond water, maybe, or what lives in bits of blood or slime. These microcosmic worlds of Thorn's seem to self-invent as we stare at them, reminding us of the disconnect between how we expect life to proceed and how life, in fact, unfolds."

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-Margaret Hawkins

Bruce Thorn: Organizing the Infinite, 2015

 

 

"This emphasis on painting as a living entity that – without representational content – materializes as an equivalent of experience rather than a depiction of it reveals Thorn to be part of a lineage of artists that include Arthur G. Dove, Agnes Martin, Richard Pousette-Dart, Theodoros Stamos, Mark Tobey, James Turrell, and others who developed a new visual language for experience through forma of abstraction. Each of these artists found profound inspiration in nature, though wished to avoid illustrating the particulars of nature.

 

Thorn’s painting exudes a powerful force on the viewer as though the image is in communion with the body. It seems to simultaneously conduct and transmit energy.”

 

-Robert Cozzolino

Subconscious Eye, 2013