Passive Animal Dance, Around We Go by Todd Brugman
Permission
ways of being apart
a jar and a box in a drawer
never touching
a marsupial and a boy playing
in a forest at different times
agreements uttered
by one side forgotten
asking questions
then not listening
a potted plant
beside a grown tree
one commuter facing forward
another back
flowering rarely
for undisclosed reasons
drinking deeply to come alive
then clamming back up.
toppling
some bushes attenuate in competition their spines
stacked for toppling born along by adversaries
they drink enough to extend farther and push
a dozen flowers out | if circumstances raze
those adversaries their tendrils sag | forearms
resting in grass send up shoots at hazardous angles
asking to be trimmed back to a juvenile state
About the author:
Nathaniel Calhoun works to protect and restore biodiversity from his home in Aotearoa New Zealand. This takes most of his time, so he always appreciates connections and support from people who can help him with his writing and its distribution. His poems have featured Oxford Poetry, New York Quarterly, Poetry Aotearoa and many others; but he hasn’t yet published a chapbook or a collection. he sometimes tweets @calhounpoems
In the artist’s words:
Todd Brugman:
For me, creating art is deeply personal, it is loosely autobiographical, therapeutic, and the answer for everything: in every sense of the meaning of ‘everything.’ My art doesn’t illustrate something, it is that something. That something is nuances of nuances of a frozen moment of an emotion that is universally ineffable. It is like smelling the air on a certain spring day that smells like spring, but smells like no other day you’ve smelt, and the smell correlates to a feeling; this particular feeling can never be described as it is intrinsically terminally unique. As Jackson Pollack once said, “There is no accident, just as there is no beginning and no end.” I too deny the accident. An accident is seen as an error in perfection however within art, imperfection becomes beautiful as a result of its errors. It has been said “to err is human,” and I couldn’t agree more.
I paint a lot of geometric shapes and what may appear to be straight line-work. I do the best I can, but don’t turn back if a line gets shaky, that little shake now gives my work a human element. It doesn’t matter what my starting subject was, allowing this human element to exist creates beauty. One may have no idea what a songwriter or musician is actually saying with a song, but this doesn’t stop them from feeling what that song represents to them. Just as you can be uninformed about the life event that inspired the origin of my painting but still feel what that work emotes and how you relate to it.
What we don’t understand in nature we can break down the natural visual work using geometry. It’s the easiest means to describe a complex universe and define what we call thought, emotion, and sentience. I am ever so slowly, yet never quite, solving these geometric equations through my paintings, which have no beginning and no end. Todd Brugman . todd.brugman@gmail.com
All photos are taken by me, Todd Brugman, all work is my own. I work out of my Studio at Shepherd Maugligh Studios in Newton, MA. I live in Somerville, MA, and work with various Boston art galleries.