Brent Spink

I am a product of the Great Lakes, raised around spectacular bodies of freshwater.  After receiving a BFA in painting from Western Michigan University in 1980, the mountains and adventure pulled me West.  The Great Lakes region calls me home, time after time.

  My work as a painter is the ballast that has kept my wildly storm tossed life on an upright trajectory.  Storytelling and visual poetry dictate my decision making, a kind of escape through dreaming, a search for truth, a climate of coping.  My paintings are a form of translation.  My experiences and confrontations in wild places- not necessarily remote, sometimes just off the edge of a sidewalk- formulate and communicate through the act of constructing a painting, and it is a construction, a sometimes complicated frenzied construction. My paintings are expressive, painterly, charged with color relationships, impatient for the perfect vehicle to transport the interpretation.  The act of painting is both a form of alchemy and a form of anarchy, disorienting and also directing, unpredictable.  When I step off the edge of the sidewalk is when the process unfolds, as uncertain as a gusting wind. 

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