TIM BRAWNER

Tim Brawner is a Brooklyn based artist who received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in painting and printmaking in 2020. He has exhibited work in New York, Los Angeles. London, Beijing, and Moscow. In addition to painting, Tim maintains a devoted drawing practice, and was recently a participant in the NYC Drawing Center Viewing Program. His work has been featured in shows at Perrotin, Union Pacific, PAGE NYC, Ashes/Ashes, and Fragment Gallery. His work is chiefly concerned with figure, narrative, animality, illustration, popular culture, and stylistic marriage.

Hi Tim! Thanks for joining me for Mint Tea. To begin, what’s your favorite tea? If you don’t drink tea, what kind of coffee or drink do you enjoy the most?

I don't drink tea, I'm more into coffee. And then when it comes to coffee, I'm not very discerning. I mostly drink black cold brew or black iced coffee. It's really pretty utilitarian in its purpose for me – it’s to wake up. Although, I have a friend who described the ritual of preparing matcha tea, and I think that sounds kind of exciting. I feel like as I'm getting older, I'm trying to base more of my days around daily rituals and routines.

Could you tell me about your background and your practice?

I was always sketching when I was a kid. And then in undergrad, I went to a liberal arts school and I majored in studio art. And then I kind of went through a phase of deciding whether I was more interested in painting or illustration shortly after undergrad, and I just gravitated towards painting. The rhythms of painting make more sense to me, and I would say that most people I met who were illustrators seemed very miserable. Then after that, I did a few shows in New York before going to graduate school. I feel like I had sort of a second art school in New York, because I befriended an artist that I'd been a fan of since I've been a teenager, and I felt like he really taught me a lot. I just felt like he really, really helped me understand how to construct a picture in a more interesting way. Then, during grad school and since, I've just been steadily showing, and I'm working towards my debut solo show here in New York at Management Gallery this spring.

Who was the artist who was like a mentor to you?

His name is Al Colombia, he’s a cartoonist. He’s sort of a figure in alternative American comics that I think is vastly underappreciated. I became a fan of him when Fantagraphics released his book, Pim and Francie. I had read horror comics that felt potent before them, people like Graham Ingels and a lot of the stuff Charles Burns had done for RAW back in the day, and then, when I read Pim and Francie, I had a very strong feeling of uneasiness come over me. The way that book is constructed, it's so vertiginous and dark. It was a book that, before I met Al, it felt like this evil totem that I had on my bookshelf. It ended up that when I was an undergrad, I was president of the art club, and we could help decide on visiting artists. Al was the first artist I wanted to reach out to so he could give a lecture at my school, and he did, and it was a super positive experience. And then he and I just kept in contact for a long time.

Actually, dating back to middle school, I somehow online stumbled upon some American underground cartoonists like Richard Corben and Robert Crumb. I was really fascinated by the sense of freedom I saw on that work, especially growing up in Nebraska. You know, even though it was part of a counterculture that wasn't mine, that I was three and a half decades too late for when I found it, it still really spoke to me, it seemed very urgent. And so I would spend a lot of time copying a lot of those underground artists, the more lurid the better, the more antisocial the better. I really sort of developed a taste for antisocial art. And I tried to draw my own comics for a bit. They tended to be really bad, short sci-fi comics or horror comics, but past high school, it never really progressed into much. I think there are just elements of comics and cartooning that I don't think in terms of. In terms of pacing and storytelling as they relate to layout, and then just technical things like lettering, I just didn't have much interest in that.

What projects are you working on right now?

Right now I'm working on a new body of work for a solo show early this year. I just finished curating a show at my alma mater, a group show. And then I have a few potential group shows lined up for the year as well.

The latest body of work I showed were these animal hybrid chimeras. I think I was just really interested in animality and caricature. But the newest body of work, actually most of the figures are like angry hippies, or 1960s, 1970s countercultural types. And then a few paintings of more of these chimeras, the sort of indeterminate subjects that are an amalgamation of human and animal, and animate and inanimate. When I'm drafting a painting, I tend to use cut up technique a lot. I spend a lot of time drawing and drafting and after a while, I'll start to cut up drawings and mix them together, and then sometimes I'll collage. And then I draft over that until I kind of arrive at a kind of affect, or something that I'm going for. When I can sort of name it, or it seems familiar, is when I feel like I have a subject that's ready to paint.

I am the most familiar with your paintings. Can you talk about how and why you choose to work with the media that you do?

Well, I was initially trained to paint in oil paints, but over time, I found that there were certain effects and colors that I wanted to achieve that were difficult to achieve in oil. And I also came around to acrylic because of how close to it is to drawing, and how making marks with it is very similar to drawing. And in fact, to further that point, I paint on canvas, but it's actually stretched over panel because I want to mimic the resistance of a sheet of paper against a drawing table or something, whereas canvas has so much give. I actually found that it seems like acrylic paint, the hues could hit a higher pitch than oil paint can in some ways. Although, as I move further, I feel like I'm noticing the limitations of acrylic. I've been thinking about folding oil back into my practice.

What is your painting process like? Do you start the painting with a specific image in mind from the beginning or does it evolve organically as you go?

It's kind of a very elliptical drafting process. It may start with a prompt that I give myself, or it might just be that I start drawing and a kind of image, or scene, or character emerges. And then normally during the drafting process, like I said, I instituted a sort of cut up technique where I'll begin to mix drafts together, or sometimes bring in outside visual references, and then draft on top of that. And then, once I feel like that preparatory draft is in a spot where the image seems familiar, or there's a kind of affect that I can locate and relate to, then it goes into painting. And the painting process is normally like transferring a large cartoon copy of the preparatory drawing onto a larger surface, and then at that point it's still not very linear. I have trouble working on in a linear way, so I just tend to try and work out the painting from there. I may redraft some things and then go back in. The drawing and drafting process always feels super important to me.

What inspires the images behind your paintings?

Different things. I would say that the chimera subjects I was working with, I was interested in some of the marginalia and creatures that Goya had drawn into Los Caprichos, and I was also interested in things like yokai, which are these Japanese folk monsters and ghosts. In general, interested in the idea of a monster or creature as an expression of affect, but also that some of the sources I was pulling from, particularly children's fantasy stories, which tend to be pretty authoritarian in nature, that there was a sort of ideological residue from pulling from that imagery. Also, I tend to think what I find interesting about mythological creatures is that they often betray a sort of value system that's pre-humanist and pre-enlightenment and describes an entire worldview that’s morally alien to us. I think we have a tendency to project liberal humanist values back on to fantasy creatures, which is sort of Disney's role as a contemporary media conglomerate. But something like Struwwelpeter, you can clearly see a tendency towards authoritarianism and corporal punishment, baked into these fantasy stories for children that predate German military progression by only a few decades. Or even stories involving trickster spirits, or fae folk, these entities from outside who aren't necessarily good or bad, they just have motivations that are completely foreign to us.

I’m interested in the idea that the world is governed by these chaotic motivations that we can't understand. I think those sort of concepts and stories, there's something about them that they're almost like a circuit, in that they initially seem to make our world seem so much more fantastical, and then the longer you think about them, they're actually sort of an expression or a mythology of anxiety based around the material conditions of being alive and being a person. I think the end of the circuit is beginning to question why you're personifying inanimate things. I want to say that in a sensitive way, because I think those stories are important. I'm not saying that I don't think those stories are important. But it's like how so many horror stories that I know are of dolls coming to life or mannequins coming to life. I feel that imagery is potent because when you analyze that, I think it's sort of projection. That in a way, people are briefly animated dolls or mannequins that then are no longer animated after a while. I think there's also more positive attitudes in that vein with something like panpsychism, the idea that consciousness resides in everything, like even rocks have a kind of consciousness.

The nice thing about animism and animality is that when you substitute something for a person as a subject, it complicates it so much more. I think obviously, human figures in art are important and engage a very important discourse around identity, and I think there's a lot of work that's about signifiers of identity in portraiture and stuff. But I do think – and it's not to sidestep identity by any means – but I think if you're making a subject that doesn't necessarily have signifiers that we would recognize as being based on people, you end up going into more of a gray area. I guess it's sort of like, you're being asked to wonder about the motivations of a flower, rather than a person, or something.

Can you talk about any imagery or symbols that you like to work with?

I tend to have a lot of floral motifs and forests in some of the work. I think I just like that, as somebody raised in Middle America at the start of the 21st century. My connotation of the woods is stories of people having some sort of mystical encounter or some sort of psychic encounter with UFOs or cryptids or something, and I think it's just good set dressing for confrontation. And that sort of occupies the trash stratum of American culture, UFOs and cryptids and stuff like that, but I think it speaks to a larger mythology of anxiety. You know, there's this great historiography document called Wisconsin Death Trip, where it's a lot of news clippings about these Midwestern communities at the turn of the 19th century. There were a lot of sort of utopian communities in the Midwest, little enclaves that would have small presses and put out newspapers. And one of the trends you notice in this book, in a lot of them, when the community started to fail, people started seeing lights out in the woods, or they started seeing monsters out at the edge of the woods, or wild men, which were tall men covered with fur. Just the idea that the wilderness or the forest in the US, as a kind of cultural heritage from colonialism and imperialism, there's like a fear of nature, that you can encounter anything in nature, or that we are separate from the land here in some way.

I think flowers are very strange. They're very wholesome, but their sex is very apparent, and it's also like a very public display of mortality, watching the brief season where the flowers bloom and then die. Yeah, I think flowers are really strange. And I think if you have a sort of lens where you're thinking about flower intelligence, or plant intelligence, or mycological intelligence, I find them very weird. Especially in the sense that they're often treated as props or set dressing, and they are their own singular being.

I love how your paintings have a twisted, fantastic narrative that reminds me of fables and fairy tales, as well as classic twentieth century animations. Does folklore and narrative relate to your practice? If so, how?

Only in as much as I think narrative elements can be funny and make for an interesting picture, or open up questions for a picture. But I'm not personally interested in creating a narrative or some sort of grand mythology myself. I think my interest in certain narrative aspects of maybe the fantasy or folklore is just how open they are in terms of storytelling. You know, characters die and come back, characters’ motivations change from story to story. I think I'm drawn to that sort of imagery in the way that it can turn the viewer into a detective of some sort, but I'm not personally interested in constructing a mystery for them, or explaining the mystery.

Early animation, I suppose I like it for that same reason too. That, and there's this kind of polymorphous perversity to some of those early Fleischer Brothers cartoons, Out of the Inkwell and stuff like that, that I find interesting, and also very visually engaging. I think if there is a thing that I find interesting from Disney, it's animism, the way that they are able to, in the case of inanimate objects, imbue them with a sense of affect, and consciousness, and personality. I think in my own work, I'm interested in things like pereidolia and anthropomorphism, so that's always kind of lined up with me. And just formally, one of the first how to draw books I got was Drawn to Life, by Walt Stanchfield, who was an animator at Disney who created all these lessons for the younger animators. That was just lying around the house when I was a kid, so it sort of formatted the hard drive when it came to drawing. And I think I kind of developed this sort of cuteness curse that I'm still figuring out my relationship to.

Are there any mythological creatures you especially like or relate to?

I don't know. You know, I think that's a dangerous question because I think if you say you relate to a certain mythological creature, you might be telling on yourself in a certain way. But one I could think of is the wendigo, which is part of Native American folklore. It's different in different tellings, but it's a spirit that either possesses people, or grows out of people who get cabin fever during the winter and engage in cannibalism. Normally it's either this invisible spirit that's on the wind, and the howling of the wind is actually the howling of the wendigo. Or I remember a story that a storyteller came from a reservation when I was at a summer camp to tell us, and he described the Wendigo as looking like a man, but he'd eaten off the ends of his fingers and his nose and his lips because he was so hungry. And I guess I can relate to that mythological creature because I have a lot of different appetites. And I also don't do well in isolation.

I really love the expressive characters and animated objects in your paintings. Who and what are they?

I would say mostly an expression of affect. I view a lot of these paintings as portraits, and it's just a lot of brainstorming and drafting and collaging until I have a moment of recognition with the subject. I think in some sense, although the work isn't personal, I think there might be an aspect of self-portraiture sometimes. I think about Thomas Ligotti, this author I really like, who in some of his work talks about a model of consciousness obliterating itself by dividing itself into smaller and smaller entities. I think that sort of lines up with Carl Jung's idea of producing a painting as some sort of psychic parasite latching on to you that makes you disseminate it. That's sort of a very fantastical way of describing that I get the idea of a certain subject. There might be small narrative elements, but generally the narrative in my mind is like snap quick, and I can describe the circumstances to somebody in under in a sentence or two, even if it's not perfectly conveyed in the painting. I have a painting of a skull with a shot glass, about to take a drink at a bar, that's held together with hardware. And I remember showing that painting to somebody and they thought it was like a monster or Frankenstein type subject, or something. And it was really a lot more basic than that. I was thinking about George Grosz’s work, “Fit for Active Service,” and just thinking about a man or a woman who'd been through something awful. In the painting they've literally been flayed alive and they're held together with screws, but they're still making it to the bar for a drink.

What are your favorite colors? Do they find their way into your artworks?

In some ways, yeah. One of my favorite colors is green, and I haven't done a lot of green paintings. I've kind of transitioned into working in monochromes for the time being. For a period there I was really interested in a lot of primary colors, but recently I'd say my favorite colors have been olive green, cream color, lots of earth tones, and brown. Blue and gray will always be big for me.

Is there a new medium that you would like to try or to work in more?

I don't want to go too far into it, but I sometimes have ideas for video work. But I think there would be a lot of tests and studies before any of that makes its way out of the studio.

Can you talk about any films, animations, comics, or games that you like and find visually inspiring?

Well, as I said, I found a lot of alternative and underground American comics super inspiring growing up. Same thing with a particular sub-genre of manga called ero guro that I found when I was younger, that I think had a major formal influence on me, and I think also sort of sensitized me to extremity in art, although I don't think my art is particularly extreme. Finding ero guro, mostly artists like Shintaro Kago, or Suehiro Maruo, or Jun Hayami, was really formative for me, because you could see these artists really taking some deep-set antisocial feelings for a walk in their work. And I feel like that's one of the cool things you can do with art, is you can take antisocial feelings for a walk and then put them down.

I would say in terms of animation, I'm more interested in Richard Williams, who was an animator. He made this movie called The Thief and the Cobbler, and he also did work on Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Same thing with Phil Tippett, who was a stop motion animator, who finally just released this long-gestating epic called Mad God that I found really interesting. And then a lot of anime. I mean, the classics. The guy who did Paranoia Agent, and Perfect Blue, and Tokyo Godfathers, and Paprika, Satoshi Kon. I like that, and then a lot of horror mangakas like Kazuo Umezu. I guess if there's one Disney film that I found to be an influence, it might be Sleeping Beauty, particularly the background paintings.

And then in terms of movies? Gosh, I would say mostly horror and genre films, whether or not they're very good. I think oftentimes, actually the crummier the genre film is, and the more deprived the production is, you can arrive at images and moments in those movies that are really, really unhinged. And I think if you think about them, they can really help you be generative and creative.

Where are you located now? Do you think where you are located influences your practice?

I'm located in Brooklyn. And, no. I mean, yes, in the sense that you sort of take part in the community, and I think that community can be inspiring. And I mean, yes, only in the sense that I definitely think living in New York can shake your worldview. I think like my life up until this point, moving from Nebraska to New York City has taken me places, like artistically, intellectually, that I otherwise may not have gone and that can be a good and bad thing. But in terms of imagery, not really.

How do you stay connected to your community?

I guess, how anybody stays connected. Once you get out of graduate school, it can be hard not to feel like you're dealing with atomization and a loss of community, but it's just how you stay connected to any community. You know, I go to functions, I go to openings, group chats, stuff like that. I recently finally started curating group shows, which I did find to be a very rewarding process. I had never been in that position where I could reach out to people whose work I admired and try to think of who would sit next to each other in the show.

What’s your favorite tool?

I think probably audiobooks. I tend to have a lot of audiobooks going when I'm painting. It’s just a good way to stay out of my head while I'm working. I think, being a painter, one of the occupational hazards can be unhappiness, and I think isolation can really contribute to that. It's a thing you have to you really have to work at, maintaining a kind of spiritual balance if you're actually going for it.

What is the space where you do your work?

I guess I'll be very materialist about it. I have a drawing table in my room that I work from and draft on a lot. And then I have my studio space, that's about a five minute walk from where I live, where I just do the painting. I think doing that kind of helps bifurcate the practice, and dedicating each space to its own portion of the practice can be really helpful. I know what I'm doing when I'm in this space, I know what I'm doing when I'm in that space.

Do you have any ritual that helps you get into the zone?

Generally, I go to the gym pretty early in the morning before I head to paint. Also, normally if it's a full day of painting, I take a break around two in the afternoon to read a short story or something. I guess in terms of other rituals, it's stuff like making coffee in the studio, going out on a coffee run, if I had a good day of painting, treating myself with a particularly decadent sandwich or something. I'm trying to work through the sandwich menus at some of the delis around me, so. And again, a lot of audiobooks. I just think it's good to have background noise that you can tune in and out of, if you're in the part of the work that's more like drudgery, or if you're alternating in and out of drudgery and decision making.

When do you know when you are finished with your artwork or a body of work?

I mean, a painting is so difficult. Painting is so open. You know, certain works even get reworked after a show. I think it's when I just don't feel like I'm going to learn anything from a painting anymore. That tends to be when it's finished for me. And then a body of work, I guess in my head, I haven't sealed off any of my bodies of work yet. That might be a good question for later in my life, but for right now, I feel like it's sort of like spinning plates, there are subjects and kinds of paintings that I've revisited in some form or another. I think a studio practice isn't linear. Like, I only know a show is done because it opened.

Who are your favorite practicing artists?

I would say probably Victor Man, Jutta Koether, Raymond Pettibon. A younger artist that I like is Harry Gould Harvey IV, who was in the Triennial at the New Museum recently. Yeah, and Julien Ceccaldi.

What gives you the feeling of butterflies in your stomach?

You know, I wish I could give a more positive answer to this. I think mostly, fear or apprehension. I think like most people, especially living in a city, I'm in sort of an Elizabethan cell of little ease. And there's just a whole bumper crop of potential, both personal and global, apocalyptic scenarios that I can just go over in my head all the time. And that normally that gives me butterflies in my stomach. I wish I could say it’s some sort of amazing romantic partner, or the feeling of transcendent beauty in nature or something, but yeah, I think it mostly comes out of fear and angst.

www.timbrawner.com | @tim_brawner