ABOUT SHAYNE BRANTLEY
​Deftly rendered and ambitious in scale, Brantley’s paintings are fantastically intimate and subtly engaging. Brantley is a graduate of the University of Minnesota MFA program including an Artist Residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (Maine). His works have been featured in numerous exhibitions across the United States including Texas, Minnesota, Maine, and Illinois. He currently resides in Galveston, Texas.
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HIS WORK
Richly layered application of paint and resonant color palettes are deployed on metal, wood, canvas and paper. Creating sublime planes of rich imagery and powerful compositional sweep, Shayne Brantley’s work manages a visceral response.
“I’ve always felt my art is fairly straightforward. It is neither ironic nor satirical. What I like to produce are pieces that are open and ethereal. I use a technique that is almost sculptural in application; building up surfaces of different color and texture, then scraping back through them.
As an undergraduate, I told myself to approach pieces without any preconceptions, but this became impossible after a while. I then approached the work with formal aspects being the primary consideration until about two years in. It was then that my instructor, Joe Havel, told me to, “Stop composing”. Since then, I just throw stuff at the work and see what sticks. This is where the building and scraping back through the layers in the process becomes a strategy and yields pleasingly unanticipated results. If not, more building and scraping. Eventually, the pieces find me where I find them.
Philosophically the work seems to struggle between being and nothingness capitulating toward being with the caveat that purpose is no qualifier of being. All this is squeezed through my psyche, not archetypical or Jungian, simply somewhat shared and eventually, through image and process and hope, puts a “there” there.”
Brantley’s work is a fantastic play of representation and color, attenuated by texture mapping an experience the viewer’s own imagining animates with the skill and ingenuity of the artist’s endeavor always within reach.