David Brewster
Defining Heart and Soul:
David Brewster and The Art of Action
by Clara Rose Thornton
Of the 300 artist applicants to The Art of Action project, David Brewster of Halifax was the only individual from Southern Vermont chosen as one of the 10 finalists. (Charlie Hunter, Bellows Falls; Dana Wigdor, Brattleboro and Elizabeth Torak, Pawlet, were among the 20 finalists selected from Southern Vermont.)
Defining Heart and Soul:
David Brewster and The Art of Action
by Clara Rose Thornton
Of the 300 artist applicants to The Art of Action project, David Brewster of Halifax was the only individual from Southern Vermont chosen as one of the 10 finalists. (Charlie Hunter, Bellows Falls; Dana Wigdor, Brattleboro and Elizabeth Torak, Pawlet, were among the 20 finalists selected from Southern Vermont.)
Brewster has been granted a lofty commission to create his proposed vision of bringing Vermont to the future’s threshold — through paint. Brewster is an alla prima oil painter, meaning that he paints only from life in one sitting.
“Because the subjects I have proposed for The Art of Action project offer such challenging visual relationships,” Brewster explained, “the solutions I’ll be forced to invent for unifying the chaos will hopefully bring about a major evolution in my use of color, pictorial harmonies and physical implementation of materials and techniques… I chose a series of themes that currently constitute the ‘Heart and Soul’ of Vermont, as communicated to me by the Vermonters I’ve interviewed—Halifax townspeople where I live. The resulting painted subject narratives are not solutions to challenging issues facing Vermonters today, but rather provide artistic provocations that can inspire people to see, imagine alternatives for living and ultimately teach how to love.”
Brewster proposed a series of large-form paintings addressing issues that repeatedly surfaced in his interviews: American Split, examining the same-sex marriage debate; Nugget Mania, a treatise on poverty and the manner in which fast food chains commodify destitution; Spurred into Action, concerning climate change and its test of fabled, hardy Vermonter subsistence; and Mountain Ridge Wind Turbines, about sustainability and the inevitable switch to renewable energy.
Of these works, “Nugget Mania” is the most striking and thematically rich. I confront the monstrous seduction of fast food, and the ways that this franchise encourages ill health and poverty for many Vermonters.”
“It is not only a financial and nutritional poverty,” Brewster continued, “but a cultural one, because healthy whole foods are not bought locally. McDonald’s symbolizes an exportation of resources in a state that is capable of producing excellent local food.”
His way of rendering images in sweeping, kinetic color have the bold effect, in this particular work, of a garish building plopped precariously into a landscape, poised to tenuously leap into the next available spot, however meager— hence the idea of the franchise’s permeation of a quite rural terrain. Forever chasing the level of immediacy possible through alla prima creation, Brewster channels this concept of “protest art” through real-time reaction.
Brewster mused, “I’m thankful that I’m able to sustain a classical vision through experimentation. It’s the quality of my seeing that is challenging me to respond with an even more facile way of achieving results that match what I imagine the world—and Vermont—to be.”
