"Being There," The Magic of Joe Brubaker

by Paul Liberatore

Stepping into Joe Brubaker’s studio is a little like imagining what it would be like to suddenly find yourself in the Tuscan workshop of the fictional Italian wood carver Geppetto, who created a rather famous wooden puppet. You almost expect Pinocchio to suddenly appear, demanding to be turned into a real boy.?

As it happens, Brubaker was thinking of the Pinocchio story when he created Carlo, a four-foot-tall silver-painted wooden figure that suggests – with its metallic sheen and tiny metal heart – the Tin Man in the “Wizard of Oz.”? As with Pinocchio, Carlo has arms and legs and hands that bend and move like a marionette without strings.

“My challenge was to do a Pinocchio referenced figure that wasn’t maudlin or cliché,” the artist says, explaining that in creating a new character, he often imagines himself channeling a soul that’s out there in the universe and wants to return in material form, calling it “a Geppetto moment.”

Working with wood, metal and found objects, he envisioned Carlo as a world-wise soldier with a handsome rust-colored hat and a vintage leather belt fashioned from a horse bridal the artist scavenged from his aunt’s barn in Missouri.

Carlo is the newest recruit in what Brubaker calls his “army of somnambulists,” alien figures that have sleep-walked their way out of his imagination and into his work for years, reappearing once again in his new show, “Being There,” at the Seager Gray Gallery in Mill Valley.

?A fan of myths and magic, Brubaker unveils a new cast of fantastical beings, each with its own name, personality, backstory, costume and body decoration often inspired by indigenous peoples throughout the world.?

“All art making to me form is a form of magic,” he says.? “We’ve gotten away from the idea of magic, thinking about mountains and trees that talk. To me, the art making process is essentially that kind of magic.”

Brubaker explores his fascination with fantasy in characters like the Elf King, a long-legged figure with downcast eyes and pointy Spock-like ears that the artist thinks of as “an imaginary leader his somnambulist army.”

“I tell people that when they look at this piece to imagine ‘Yellow Submarine,’ (sculptor Alberto) Giacometti and (filmmaker) Tim Burton,” he says with a grin. “If you put all of those together, you get the Elf King.”?

After studying painting as an undergraduate, Brubaker earned an MFA from UCLA in a self-designed major he dubbed “vernacular architecture,” encompassing everything from barn building to mud huts. The sculpture department was right next door to his, and his distinctive and original style of magical realism and fantasy would emerge from the cross-department work he did in college in sculpture along with his attraction to outsider and folk art. The Spanish colonial Santos reliquary figures he saw in churches as a young man traveling in Mexico have been a particularly powerful influence.

In a wall-piece he calls “Between Worlds,” he incorporates an abstract cedar relief carving, weathered plywood scavenged from a dock near his houseboat in Sausalito and a primitive statue of a peasant man brandishing a knife that an unknown artist carved in some little village in South America. This is the first time he’s ever used a sculpture he didn’t create himself in a work, giving it more cross-cultural resonance and mystery in his mind than if he’d used one of his own creations.?

“It’s a fantastic figure I’ve had for years,” he says. “This is what I call the magic of art, taking the tools you have as an artist and putting two stories together to make one story.”

Brubaker considers himself as much a bricolage artist as a sculptor, collecting random pieces of junk that he repurposes in his work. A rusted coffee can from the sands of the Mojave Desert, for example, becomes a stovepipe hat for a clownish fellow named Sergio, and old costume jewelry embedded in a long sheet of metal transforms into a regal robe for Constantine, an ersatz emperor in what the artist describes as “the post-apocalyptic world” of his imagination.

As a teenager in high school, Brubaker had what he calls his first “art crush” on the great Picasso, and he pays homage to his idol with a series of elegant harlequin figures – both standing and wall pieces - in a polished mosaic of colors -- rich shades of red, blue, yellow and green highlighted by gleaming gold leaf. He was introduced to fine quality gold leaf by his longtime friend and frequent collaborator Don Guthrie, an artist who had a high-end sign-painting shop in San Rafael.?

For this show, Brubaker worked with Marin artist Kathleen Edwards on “being,” a large torso of a male figure, and with Guy Mayenobe and Sam Dantone on “Nightship,” an enchanted rowboat they created out of wood, colored pencils, paint and found objects.

Most of Brubaker’s figures are carved out of white or yellow Alaskan cedar, the same wood used by indigenous Inuit carvers. In this show, he experimented for the first time with Carrara marble, sculpting a centurion commander named Augustine with a metal helmet and a bust streaked with bold, almost psychedelic, acrylic colors.

In the tradition of Egyptian tomb figures and Buddhist stone sculptures, he carves his characters with their eyes either open or closed, but always with a neutral, often meditative facial expressions.?

“As soon as you suggest sadness or sorrow or happiness, like with theater masks, it drives the piece in a certain direction,” he explains. “I want people to look at the work and attach their own associations to it.”

In this show, Brubaker’s interest in spirituality and contemplation can be seen most clearly in the figure of Martine, a monk whose face, eyes closed in a suggestion of serenity, is framed dramatically by the hood of his robe.

“His naturalistic head is thrusting forward, actively engaging the universe,” Brubaker says. “The idea is the evolution toward consciousness. Maybe I’m a secular religious carver, but I always come back to contemplation.”

In this, his seventh show at Seager Gray Gallery, Brubaker sees himself as part of a figurative tradition that dates back to the earliest carved human figures found in caves in Europe.“

One of the reasons I was drawn to figurative work is that you’re stepping into a lineage that’s got this heavy magic, a collective conscious experience,” he says. “People have been making these effigies all the way from mud figures to Michelangelo. So you’re stepping into a stream that’s already running. You don’t have to make anything up. You can do variations, but it’s a very powerful stream to step into.”

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