Artist Statement

My work is rendered in an energetically charged process.  These visionary or shamanic painted stories redress our world and worlds beyond in a communal reciprocity.  Much of my imagery is dreamlike, and comes to me in dreams, visions, and other liminal states of consciousness where the material world meets the spirit world. I am attracted to dreamlike places where tropes merge, meanings shift, and past, present, and future fuse. At these junctures space can become time, and time can turn into space.

Form, structure, color, and other aspects of visual expression both define and defy meaning simultaneously. Work created from and inspired by these states of consciousness often evokes an embodied and participatory response in the viewer. The viewer finishes the story in their head and heart, becoming a part of the work, just as the work becomes a part of the viewer.

AXIS MUNDI

Biography

Brian Brogan was born in 1958 in Brooklyn, NY.  He lived on the Massachusetts north shore for many years.  With great resonance to the spirit of nature he spent much of his time in the woods, mountains and beaches of New England.  Creative, adventurous and a little spirited, he left for the service at the age of 18 years for travel and adventure.  He has lived and traveled around the world for more than 20 years and in more than 20 countries. While on a ship for 2 years he focused on writing and published The Hailing Light of Bees, a book of surreal poems.  He has co-hosted a written literature venue on-line, and writes pieces on art and spirit via his blog and artist face book page.   Spending 5 years in the Far East, his interest developed in the quiet of eastern philosophy.  He disciplined himself to Qi Gong mastery and teachings, and became a Feng Shui consultant and teacher.  Writing for a year at a Buddhist temple, his work took on the form of comic strips for an International Buddhist magazine, done in collaboration with a Chinese art professor and colleague whom he studied  Qi Gong and helped in museum performance/installation art (Buddhist Sand Painting.) Brian Brogan has a great affinity for indigenous/aboriginal peoples and Native Americans, spending time with their teachings.  All of this has greatly influenced his painted stories including his shamanic work.  His painted visions come from the depths and heights of spiritual experience.  The passage from poetry to painted stories was a fluid transition, from one dream world to another.  For Brian Brogan dreams are real.

SOLARIUM OF HEART TALK

I watch the prophesized shipwreck
In the onyx of my ring

Curio seekers scour the earth for her
For the vanishing language
Of untroubled hours

I resurrect the lady leaning against sea and sky
Trapped holy wings in being too human

I find her shoulder sewn
Attached to the swell of wave
Curling back
To the polished bone

This day you find out who you are
In our solarium of heart talk
I pick up ghost pieces of her shine
White foam of her mouth crashes
Along my shore where she’ll always reside

A reckless angel who thinks
“I had my wings folded in”
“Forgot who I was”

Gather these connections
Grow to listen like a plant in the rain
Place flowers in each other
Filling the forest bottom
Of your troubled hearts

Groom the aching painted flower
To be more than arguments with God

Crows in dying light
Where is the wilder influence

Burrow down next to me and listen
Leaves blow inside this perishing body
The elder is lodged in the heart

Wisdoms demand to hold to a child like dust
Knowing the fires magnetism until ash

Wait like a garden of wind
Bring yourself anything to grow
Whatever awakes the sleeping Goddess

My songs to you
Will scatter like ponies in the rain
One will stop by the high leak
Embodied in loves water

For where we drink
Holy fish fly
From where we were
Once without meaning
We feel the rise
Bones splitting into feathers
Amends to the fodder of paradise.