About the Artist
A brief biography of David Brokaw
I still recall that in first grade we did finger painting one day. The class’s art works were laid out on the hall floor outside the classroom to dry. I was proud of mine, with artful swirls throughout. A few pictures down from mine was Mary’s. It had a cute little house with trees and flowers and a picket fence in front. Hers, naturally, received many accolades from passersby, while the rest of ours were largely ignored. I remember looking at my lovely abstraction and her equally lovely realism and thinking that mine was just as good as hers, why didn’t anyone else see that? Anyhow Mary went on to study art and had a career as an artist. I naturally went on to study science and math. After all, it was the 1950s.
Fast forward through public school, a semester of college studying math and science, a tour of duty with the Air Force to servicing x-ray machines on Long Island. It was now 1969 with Woodstock, the moon landing, and me living just down the highway from the Hamptons. Not surprisingly, I went through a reevaluation of my life choices. I quit my job and enrolled in Orange County Community College’s new and then excellent Art Department. There I learned about a variety of painting styles, art history, figure drawing, sculpture, welding, and all those things a budding artist should know. Despite my art history instructor insisting that abstract expressionism had died in the 1950s (this was the early 1970s), that was the style I finally embraced. After OCCC, I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago where I pursued minimalism and spent many hours studying paintings from the masters, especially from the Renaissance. Several of my paintings from this period can be viewed in the Early Works gallery.
During summer vacation, I took a job at a service bureau where I operated computers that filled large rooms with industrial sized refrigerator boxes of equipment and had less computing power than the average cell phone of today. Enjoying a steady paycheck I stayed, and ended up designing and printing forms for municipalities and schools spanning the Hudson Valley. I painted whenever I could carve out space and time while living with my wife in rented apartments, trying hard not to annoy the landlords. A number of these works are in the Mid Term Works gallery.
Nearing retirement, my wife and I set up a studio/workshop space at the home we now own where I could get paint on the walls and floor with abandon. I had been toying with the idea of fusing abstract expressionism with minimalism for a number of years, and my first painting from this period is an attempt at that. I liked the double canvas concept from that effort and followed with several more. Many of the paintings from this period, hopefully with many more to be added, can be seen in the Recent Works gallery.
Just as an aside, I would like to give you an idea of what I consider abstract expressionism. Abstract painting as I am sure you know differs from realism by offering a different vision of what we see with our eyes by showing an artist’s reinterpretation of it. Expressionism goes one step further by opening up the painting to our emotions. Also, while realism and abstraction are usually painted with traditional artists’ tools like brushes and palette knives, abstract expressionism adds to our paint kit whatever tools come to mind. This could be anything from using brushes, our hands and fingers, squirting paint directly out of the tube, tossing paint out of a cup at the painting to anything else that you can imagine. On a more philosophical level, I only want to add that I’m pretty sure you know that the world, in fact the whole universe is a very chaotic place. Realistic art, along with math and science try to make sense of the chaos. I prefer to use my paintings to depict the chaos. But keep in mind, there is no better or worse among the painting styles, only differences. And, variety is what makes life interesting, isn’t it?
