Available Work July 2024 from Blake Brasher

This is a large painting on canvas in acrylic with collaged elements and marker. It contains old business cards, a wall label for another painting from an old show, and several cut-outs from a book of Mother Goose fairy tales illustrated by Richard Scarry.

As a father of two young kids (at the time of this writing we have a five month old and a three and a half year old) I'm exposed to a lot of children's books. I picked up the Richard Scarry fairy tale book from a free used book pile at our town transfer station a while ago and read a few of the stories to our older (and then only) child. I was so appalled by the casual violence and abuse depicted in these stories. I decided the best thing to do with it was to cut it up and incorporate it into my studio practice. These stories are like communal nightmares, made even more surreal by the illustrations of anthropomorphic peasant animals.

In this painting I used a lot of the "negative space" from the cut up pages to create a border of white page background around the edge of the canvas. It calls back to a lot of my work that leaves the edges of the painting untouched as a way of sort of implying contained chaos within the abstract ecosystem. This is an enforced containment, and a foreground dressed up as background. I just kind of like the idea of collaging in empty space.

The cards and such are mostly bits and bobs of stuff from around my studio. Little pieces of my personal and professional history. Direct references to older paintings. "A little bit of myself" in the work.