Don Bracken’s dirt paintings confront the viewer with their unexpected medium and intense narrative stance. These paintings are strong statements that are at once symbolic and grandiose, speaking clearly about the land and all that has begun to disappear there, and more obliquely about the events that inspired those losses. No longer, as with Bracken’s earlier work, are we in an intimate frame, regarding a dreamy world of melancholic beauty and soft distortions. These paintings exist as invitations to specific locations that come alive in themselves, that at once mourn, remember, locate, represent, and transcend their origins. Their immediacy stems from their ongoing connection with the places from which they came: the material of this art, the earth, contains its own message.

Bracken developed this technique out of his desire to represent, and to connect deeply with, the landscape surrounding him. As he puts it, “I started using dirt this summer while painting outside on a farm in the flood plain in Wethersfield,CT. I found the dirt more compelling than the colors I was using, so I started putting dirt directly on the canvas by mixing it with acrylics. This started a process, and I began feeling closer to the subject I was painting. I realized how ironic it was that if the farm hadn’t been in the flood plain, it wouldn’t have existed; instead it would be houses and strip malls. This helped me experience the fragility and vulnerability of the land.”

This is history, of course. Some paintings use the actual debris and dirt left in the wake of 9/11, and are about an America where unseen machinery, inside and outside its borders, has violently transformed nature from a smooth surface to a barely productive earth. With these paintings, the shadow or memory of a farm becomes a fallen 9/11 tower, confronting us with an experience that is disturbingly breathtaking. For us, these are still landscapes, almost memories of a traditional nature with fields and farms, but now grown dark and heavy with an earth that has exploded. Our eye is drawn into them and their horizons as if recalling a vibrant landscape from the nineteenth century, long gone. In some instances, these dirt paintings propose imaginative human engagements with history, much as other painters painted history into the minds of their contemporaries. Embedded within these dark and fallow fields, for instance, “Sphinx Calling” unexpectedly and vaguely replaces the American farm house with ancient Egyptian monuments, that had long ago offered us humanistic riddles at the beginning of history. Now it is our history. The extraordinary achievement of these paintings is to be alive with the history of the present, shatteringly insistent on their own corporeality and the corporeality of our lives today. They interrogate us about the ground zero we stand on. Viewing them is, we think, like standing physically on the moon, and seeing the earth today for the very first time.

Timothy Corrigan
Marcia Ferguson
University of Pennsylvania