Dynamic mark-making is the heart of his expressive realism.
By Kara Dicker
Lon Brauer is looking back and forward. A living history enthusiast, Brauer finds inspiration from the early Western frontier. “I’m a Remington guy,” he says. “I can look at those paintings all day long.”
A Signature member of the Heartland Art Club, Brauer is an accomplished and versatile painter recognized nationally and abroad. He describes his style as expressive realism. This year’s Members’ Showcase (March 15 – April 12) features Missouri Rain. It comes from Brauer’s repertoire of historical genre paintings that captures what he calls an old-timey feel. The oil and enamel work depicts a man in period clothing standing beside his horse amid rainfall. The piece originated from a photo shoot by Brauer in southern Missouri. “He was dressed out in 1800’s clothing,” Brauer recalls. “Right away it had a historical feel to it. I was keeping that in mind.”
The artwork garnered the Showcase’s Spencer Meagher Light Award, named in honor of the late Spencer Meagher, a much-beloved watercolorist and friend of many Heartland Art Club members, including Brauer. “He was a close friend, a really good guy,” he says. “He was a watercolorist primarily. However, he took workshops with me and started doing acrylics and oil.”
Brauer explains how he created the expression of light in his award-winning piece: “I do a lot of plein air work. You don’t capture light. I don’t look at painting that way. It’s a matter of value and color. You can give the illusion of what light does.”
Before becoming a full-time professional painter Brauer had a career in product photography. He was challenged to make “mundane subjects” appear exciting. Decades of using smears, double exposure, and breaking edges to create the illusion of motion helped set the foundation for his expressive realism style. As an artist, Brauer says it’s all about the application of paint.
“I’m really thinking about the energy of the mark-making,” he says. “How the paint goes on is what intrigues me. If it’s a grey or rainy day, there’s not a lot of movement. But in putting the paint on with energy there are all those different directions of mark-making that create energy in an otherwise static environment. “ The expression, he says, lies in the “juxtaposition of those two opposites.”
For Brauer, painting is about the process. “The result is a byproduct of the activity,” he says. “The whole journey is going to zig and zag in ways I don’t anticipate.” In building Missouri Rain, for example, Brauer
Missouri Rain, 30 x 36 oil and enamel, by Lon Brauer. The painting won the Spencer Meagher Light Award at the Members’ Showcase opening on March 15.
says some things are just intuitive, such as lighting the sky or applying soft tones to enliven the flat feel of rain. Still, the emphasis is on the process. “I never know where it’s going to go, which is what I enjoy. I really like to see and let things happen.”Brauer says his ongoing project is to do more horse and rider combination paintings. “There’s a market in the Southwest that has some avenues to be tapped,” he says. “The American West and the mythology that goes with it, I want to do that kind of imagery and do it in a contemporary way.”
Brauer is based in Granite City, Illinois. He travels extensively giving workshops, painting, and participating in historical reenactments. In the last ten years, he’s received more than 70 awards for his work, many first-place and best-of-show.