Brian Schorn

Brian Schorn is an American multi-disciplinary artist practicing out of his Studio Rubedo workshop where he uses a variety of media including assemblage, collage, painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. He has extensive education in the arts with MFA degrees in visual art, electronic music, creative writing and graphic design. Since the 1980s, Brian's art has been displayed regionally, nationally and internationally in twelve solo exhibitions and over seventy group exhibitions.

He regularly attends artist residencies throughout the United States and aspires to, one day, visit and study in Japan. Further, Brian's music, poetry, and design have been performed, published, and exhibited throughout the world. Numerous public institutions and private collectors have acquired his work. As a complement to his art experience, Brian is an avid naturalist, an outdoor adventurer and a meditation practitioner within the Shambhala Buddhist tradition.

ARTIST STATEMENT

As an artist and as a human being, I seek to explore the transmutation of matter and mind for the benefit of all. Therefore, I am interested in contemplative art practices that focus on a variety of subjects such as ordinary perception and awareness, interconnectedness, impermanence, equanimity, non-duality and the wonder of natural history. With this approach, I seek to research and experiment with meditative states and visual spaces that are free from suffering, thus offering a path to an enlightened manner of experiencing the world around us.

With the use of found and natural materials (acknowledging our deep connection to the environment), humor (light and playful approach to life), simplicity (less is more), and a heightened attention to process (i.e. grinding charcoal in a stone to make ink for calligraphy), I seek to engage the world in a curious, spacious, and open manner. Ultimately, my contemplative art practice is an ongoing attempt to see things as they are and to work with things as they are. Or, it may challenge me to ask a simple Zen question (koan) such as, “What is it, really?”

Commonly, I use two themes to interconnect the material (matter) and spiritual (mind) aspects of my work. These two themes are “wabi-sabi” and the “enso.” First, the Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi” is an aesthetic that embraces and sees beauty in, objects that are imperfect, incomplete, and impermanent. Since found and natural everyday objects provide the primary material for my work, the objects I tend to collect are rusted, withered, rotten, broken, cracked, and faded after use and natural decay. Second, the work includes a complimentary exploration of the enso, a Japanese calligraphic brush mark often created by Zen monks as a form of meditation. The enso suggests not only a moment of enlightenment but the cyclic nature of all things as they move through the stages of their existence: beginning, ending, and returning (rebirth).