What changed everything for Bray was nationally known art critic and curator Theodore Wolfe. After meeting Bray at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in the late '80s, Wolfe did something Bray says is unusual: On his way home, Wolfe stopped to see Bray's work, at the now-defunct Frick Gallery in Belfast, and upon his arrival in New York City, recommended Bray's work to the esteemed Schmidt Bingham Gallery
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How significantly did the experience in Italy shape your work?
Oh, it changed everything. Drastically. Dramatically. That work gave me the courage to begin to paint something that actually meant something to me instead of what just seemed like it was hot.
It sounds to me like this experience nailed you and gave you a vision.
Absolutely. Right there, I started painting Monson from memory. I could see my own upbringing, my own regional sense, the places that I loved and cared about. These were the first realist paintings I ever made-of the post office and Main Street and Pearl's and Clara's houses [raised by his Dad, a single parent in the '50s, "these wonderful two old ladies" kept an eye on "this all male household"]. I started working with tempera in Italy, too. I still paint my world...from memory...with tempera.
You say that you still work from memory. Why?
Well, I see it more clearly from memory. I can concentrate, focus. Sometimes what you see is so momentary, so ephemeral. Like this painting [he gestures to an incomplete painting on the easel]. I saw this coming back from the folk festival in Bangor last year. It was a brutally hot day. We were coming home, driving through the flatland by the stream in Kenduskeag, and this fog, a very low ground mist, formed on the fields. It was stunning. And lasted only a few minutes. It's taken me all these months to figure out how to sneak into it.
Sneak into it?
Well, for a while, I'm not sure what it wants to say or how, and so I just have to patiently sneak into it.
I do always get that there's a story unfolding in your work. Is that intentional?
I think that comes from painting things I've grown close to, that I have some affection for. It's like a rumination-on a moment or a certain feeling or phenomenon. It's an aesthetic thing. It comes out of the experience. Maybe it's not inherently beautiful, but there's an intimacy with it.
How do you work-like your schedule?
I paint a pretty honest day-7 to 3. People say that you paint when you're inspired. Yeh, I'd paint about three days a year if I did. It doesn't work like that.
Did you always know that?
No. I came to understand that through my father-in-law. He was a hardworking farmer who loved his work. My father was the sweetest man in the world, as good a mother as he was a father, but he worked in a mill. That was something he had to do. It was a job. He didn't love doing it. What he loved was his boys! The awareness of love and work came from my father-in-law.
Your paintings seem to me an interesting combination of complexity and simplicity all residing in the same place.
I like that. I like what that says. It's true-there's detail, but I get rid of a lot of extraneous stuff. I really strip it down-dirt, trees, sky. A lot of what we look at in nature is visual congestion, and yet when I listen to people talk about experiences in nature, they're stripped right down. They talk about the "sunset," or the "whitecaps." Everything else is gone. I try to do that with my painting. I try to get down to the skeleton of the experience.
Alan Bray is represented by the Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland. An exhibition of his new work will run from August 17 through September 10. For more information, see www.caldbeck.com.
