Biography

The subdued atmospheric surfaces of Jamie Brunson’s delicately painted canvases encourage quiet contemplation and spiritual reflection. The intricate patterns and ornamental designs she renders are based on a variety of historical and religious sources that she has discovered during her worldwide travels. Brunson is interested in both the spiritual implications of patterns as well as the role they play in cultural transmission, and to this end, her paintings function as meditative inquiries into the symbolic realm of the divine.

Brunson was born in Coronado, California, in 1955, and spent five of her childhood years with her family in Japan during her father’s naval duty. While abroad, she had little access to English-language television, and spent hours watching films, reading, and drawing. After her parents divorced in 1960, Brunson spent summers with her mother and stepfather David Crawford, a sculptor, and her step-uncle Dick Crawford, a painter who was studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts (CCAC) in Oakland. Brunson remembers the large Bohemian gatherings of artists “literally with bongo drums and jugs of wine, flamenco guitars and sketching.”1 It was this creative environment, along with her uncle’s influence, that led her to enroll at CCAC, where she took classes from Franklin Williams, Lennie Silverberg, Ron Dahl, and Judy Foosaner. She completed her studies at Mills College in Oakland where she earned an M.F.A. in 1983.

Brunson cites her childhood years in Japan as among her most formative lifetime experiences, noting that she “was in a foreign country with a strong, definitive, nature-based aesthetic that infused daily life and provided a contrast to whatever was ‘typically’ American.”2 She married art historian Mark Levy in 1987, and the couple began traveling throughout Europe and Asia, often visiting historic ruins, especially Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic religious monuments. During their travels, Brunson carefully photographed architectural details, ornamental motifs, and decorative elements, later using them as source material for her pattern-based abstractions, which are delicately crafted with layer upon layer of oil paint and transparent alkyd glaze. Art critic Mark Van Proyen has said that her “graphically flat and subtly atmospheric … paintings seem to emit an internal light that is part ‘lux’ and part ‘lumina’—partly a luxurious bath of worldly sensuality that recalls the naturalism of 17th-century Dutch still lifes and partly the emanation of divine light within that Byzantine artists and certain modernist painters strove to convey.”3

Such connotations of the divine extend beyond the luminosity of Brunson’s painted surfaces. The patterning of Sura (2002) refers to the ornate Islamic motifs found on the Mughal monuments of northern India. In some of these temples, a religious sura (“verse”) is inscribed with inlaid stone using a complex, interlaced lettering that is so ornate that the text appears as an interwoven abstraction of coiling shapes. Brunson interprets the intricacy of such decorative ornamentation as a metaphor for spirituality, and explains that the stylized patterns “seem to represent something larger than mere ornamentation—perhaps an enduring human impulse to embed the divine in corporeal form.”4 A devoted practitioner of kundalini meditation, Brunson envisions similar images of complex interconnectedness while meditating, and the stylized imagery she uses in her paintings is intended to evoke the essence of other-worldly infinity.

Underlying Brunson’s mesmerizing decorative patterning is a regimented grid that guides her superimposed layers of ornamental latticework. For this reason, her work can be viewed  as an inheritor of the Pattern and Decoration legacy that was first embraced by feminist artists in the 1970s and has recently enjoyed a resurgence among a diverse group of artists working on the West Coast.5 Brunson’s blending of lyrical abstraction and rich cultural content result in a product that is both intellectually intriguing and beautiful to behold. —A.W.

1. Jamie Brunson, letter to the author, 7 March 2004.
2. Ibid.
3. Mark Van Proyen, “Berkeley: Jamie Brunson at Traywick,” Art in America, March 2000, 138–39.
4. Artist’s statement, July 2000.
5. See Christopher Miles, “Tracking Patterns,” Art in America, February 2004, 77–81.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Jamie Brunson is a painter, teacher, critic and independent curator. She studied painting at the California College of the Arts (BFA, 1978) and at Mills College (MFA, 1983). As an independent curator, Brunson focuses on presenting the work of lesser-known or emerging artists in conjunction with work by established, mature artists to underscore the equivalences in their work. She also looks for patterns of ideological or thematic connection within the regional arts community. Brunson believes that working artists often have access to, and recognize, accomplished artists who have been overlooked by the commercial art establishment. She uses her curatorial practice to bring these artists to the forefront, by creating a context for their work. (Studio Quercus, September 2-Occtober 15, 2011)

Born in Coronado, California, Jamie Brunson studied painting at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where she earned her B.F.A., and at Mills College, where she received a M.F.A. in 1983. Brunson has exhibited throughout the Bay Area at locations including the Traywick Gallery, Berkeley; the Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; the Oakland Museum of California Art; the Richmond Art Center; and the Berkeley Art Center. One of her smaller prints is now on view in SJMA’s Koret Gallery in the exhibition Visible Rhythm. This will be the first piece by Brunson to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

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