"Bringing the Museum to You"

 

By permission of the artist, The Cyber Art Show is pleased to feature the second of two 12-piece exhibitions of works by American landscape painter, Brett Busang (born 1954 in St. Louis, Missouri).

Brett's work has been compared, favorably and not, to that of Edward Hopper, with whose ghost he studied as a young man.  (Hopper lived only till 1966, when he, Brett, was mostly eleven years old.)  Another influence, Charles Burchfield - whose unassuming appearance was startlingly at variance with his nature-infused mysticism - captured the hard realities of Depression-era America, though he came to reject such reportage in the interest of a more singular vision.  (Brett's attention is still fixed to the hard realities of his own era.) Hopper said that his work fell into a place that was neither artistic nor literary, but somewhere in between.  Brett feels similarly about his own - particularly if you wish to add baseball.  Like the writer Tom Wolfe, who thought he was on his way to a professional career, but "settled" with writing, Brett wouldn't have lifted a brush had he been able to play short-stop for a The St. Louis Cardinals.

 

Brett has exhibited at such institutions as the Museum of the City of New York; the Everson Museum, in Syracuse, NY; and the Greenville Museum of Art, in Greenville, NC.  "Painting the Town", a multi-disciplinary exhibit that preceded its eponymous counterpart at the Museum of the City of New York, ran for a year at the Valentine Museum (now The Richmond History Center) in Richmond, Virginia.  From 2001 - 2006, he mounted exhibits at his own gallery, Abattoir Fine Arts, also in Richmond.  (He maintains a studio at the site of this gallery.)  His paintings are in corporate collections (Wheat First Union, Media General, and MCV Hospitals, among others) as well as the homes of private individuals.  

 

As a writer, Brett has contributed articles, essays, and profiles, which are often about artists, to Open Letters Monthly, the Loch Raven Review, Gastronomica, Coldnoon,

Ripperology, and The Bloomsbury Review.  The 

Traditional Fine Arts Organization has archived ten others.)  He has also written essays for exhibition catalogues, notably for painter and printmaker, Bill Murphy; for NPR affiliate, WAMU; and for such mainstream publications 

as American Arts Quarterly and The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal. 

 

His blogs, chiefly 

            www.paintingisdeadandsocani.blogspot.com

 

might be considered part-intellectual biography and part curmudgeonly grandstanding.