Page 22 - the NOISE October 2012

22 • OCTOBER 2012 • the NOISE arts & news magazine • thenoise.us
CONTINUED ON 25
CONTINUED FROM 21
La Dolce Vita by Erin Brinkman is among the artist’s collection now featured at Mountain Oasis.
4PM Craig Childs will be reading from his new book Apocalypse, and he and Ms. Run- ning will be giving a stills and spoken word presentation on their collaboration, The Bet- ter Bombshell. At 7PM, as part of the Flag- staff Mountain Film Festival there will be a screening of, The Renaissance of Mata Ortiz. RaechelRunning.com
THE POWER OF THE MIND
“I’ve been painting all my life,” Erin Brink- man tells me. “In private school when I was young we had good programs, and I took pri- vate lessons outside of school. I was always coloring and finger painting before that.”
This October at Mountain Oasis, Ms. Brinkman will be hanging a selection of her paintings to display.
I was first drawn to her painting, La Dolce Vita, a reproduction of a painting of Caravag- gio’s. A beautiful young man holds a basket of fruit that seeps color down the canvas.
“That piece screams of sensuality, I wanted to magnify that feeling. The fruit is oozing. All three of these paintings,” she waves her hand to the wall above us at Morning Glory Café, “Are altered Caravaggios.”
“I have a lot of built up ideas I’ve been de- veloping,” she tells me. “It feels really good to release everything that’s built up these past ten years. I feel I’m working on a big reserve right now. New ideas come along, but there’s so much now I’m working on.”
Though she paints every day, Ms. Brink- man tries to take Sundays off to rest. “I try to reserve Sundays for doing almost nothing. It’s hard when there’s so much to do, but I feel it’s really important to rest.”
“I’m working out of my bedroom,” she shares with me. “A small portion of it is re- served for my easel. It’s a very natural setting, I’m in my home and I have everything I need right there. Usually the dogs are at my feet.”
I ask Ms. Brinkman about the paintings she has been working on lately. “I’m interested now in exploring our culture and reminding people how rich it is. With the Caravaggio pieces, I wanted to remind people about clas-
sical western culture. Ideas from so long ago are applicable now.
“Caravaggio was basically a brawler. He picked fights. I think he was banished from a couple Italian cities. He was drunk and vio- lent—yet he created these beautiful paint- ings.”
“There are so many beautiful things in the world,” Ms. Brinkman says. “Recently the power of the human mind and our capabili- ties has been really inspiring for me. People are so powerful and they don’t realize it.”
A series featuring technology from the turn of the previous century also hangs on the wall of the Morning Glory Café. “All of the new technologies really expanded people’s worlds,” she says. “I thought it was interesting to see the beauty and importance and how they contribute to society — but there’s still dark stuff underneath.”
Mountain Oasis, located at11 E. Aspen, will display the paintings of Erin Brinkman for the month of October. BrinkmanVisualArt. com
REALIZING DREAMS
Jennifer Campbell has always been inter- ested in art since the days when she would go on family camping trips and sit in the tent and draw. It wasn’t until she was a student at Arizona State University that she became enthusiastic about watercolor. “Watercolor is flexible yet also unpredictable, you can learn something new every time you paint with it,” Ms. Campbell tells me.
“I was born in the United Kingdom and relo- cated here with my family when I was twelve,” she tells me about herself. “I’m 24 now, and exactly twelve years later, I am living in a 1950s house with my boyfriend, Troy, and my puppy, Watson. By day I’m a program coor- dinator at a senior center and I use most my free time to make art. But I love to cook, I’m crazy about vintage clothes and I am teach- ing myself to play the ukulele.”
“A lot of my work is inspired by dreams,” Ms. Campbell tells me of her inspirations. “I am inspired by a lot of other artists. One artist