Art Notes - Magpies, Mushrooms & Found Steel

This passage was extracted from the Horse Fly edition of July 19, 2007 to see full article click here

"Bruce Campbell seems poised for a breakout, with his painted totem images on salvaged steel drums featured at Bonnaroo in Tennessee, the country’s largest music festival; a number of pieces at the Taos Solar Fest; and with an exhibit through the end of July at Envision Gallery, behind Overland Sheepskin on Paseo del Pueblo Norte, three miles north of Taos Plaza.

Campbell paints Picasso-esque faces and dreamy human forms on the rusted and torn surfaces of found steel artifacts like hot-water tanks, tractor hoods, and other industrial-age castoffs.

“I use found objects as canvas,” Campbell told me in an interview at Envision Gallery. “Many, many others use found objects in their art, but mostly as-is. I love the functionality inherent in them—tanks, vehicle hoods, mufflers, ducting. The patina-ed surfaces are exquisite! The shapes are so unique and evocative!”

One hazard of painting on steel patinas is that “it eats brushes up so fast, I’ve learned to use brush stubs, rags, daubers, grinders to carve images into the surface—I can paint with anything.” The contrast in his art is between the worn, torn, abandoned look of the steel, and the ethereal gradations and blending of the paint in his elongated, asymmetrical faces with heavy-lidded eyes.

Campbell, 48, discovered found-steel surfaces when he moved to an old farmstead outside of Boulder. He had been doing commercial art for 15 years, from logos to ads, clothing to greeting cards. “At the farm,” he says, “the landlord had the fire department burn down all the wooden outbuildings for practice, and they bulldozed all the leftover metal stuff into a big hole. When I found it, I thought it was a treasure trove, like an archaeological dig! I walked away from my previous business and started painting metal fulltime.”

Some of his effective pieces include “Harvestress,” with lower body from a thrown-away mannekin and upper body made of an International Harvester tractor hood; a bent shovel handle-socket with a tear in the rusted metal that suggests a suspicious nose and mouth; a car hood with an eye-turned-vertical forming a sail for Ulysses’s boat sailing through archetypal wonders and hazards; and a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood he salvaged from his farmhouse roof decking and turned into a Tree of Life with knots for apples and metallic-green interference paint suggesting foliage.

Campbell wants to do art on salvaged material in various communities and leave the art there, truly recycled in its home area."

Bruce Campbell creates a new kind of environmental art. He finds the beauty within the rusted remains of our consumer society. Campbell’s mystical, subtle paintings on his chosen “canvases” of rusted metal and weathered wood was on exhibit at the Longmont Museum from July 15 to September 3, 2006.

Campbell’s inspiration is rooted in a time when he lived on a rural farmstead where the outbuildings had recently been burned. The only things remaining were the metals - rusted pipes, tools, tanks and more. “Looking at these gorgeous forms lying everywhere, it just hit me - Why buy canvas?” Campbell said. He began to explore how to work with the patinas, dents, and general evidence of time that these objects presented to create art.

Influenced by many different cultures and artistic movements, including ancient Egypt, the Italian Renaissance, American Indian masks and totems, and much more, Campbell’s art also strongly relates to the individuality of each found object. He looks for the art within the material, using the creases in the metal, the raised grain of decaying wood, as clues to find the beauty within each piece of apparent junk, and then brings out those details with paint and subtle reworking.

Now residing in a rural part of Boulder County, Campbell has art-in-waiting, what some people might call junk, in piles behind his home and studio. The finished works appear to be from some lost civilization of kings and moon-worshippers, slowly disappearing into the inevitable decay.

-Erik Mason
Longmont Museum and Cultural Center