Abstracts that look to the sky
ABSTRACT PAINTER CHARLES GULBRANDSEN ECHOES HIS GRANDFATHER’S GRAND CENTRAL CONSTELLATIONS
The artist Charles Gulbrandsen is happy to agree when viewers tell him they see a celestial quality in the abstract paintings that mark the latest stage in his varied career. “It’s fully my intention to bring a little bit of the divine into the ordinary,” he says, before cautioning he does not consider himself especially devout.
Rather, his celestial inspirations come from close encounters of another kind. It happens that Gulbrandsen’s paternal grandfather worked on the 1913 crew that painted the ceiling constellations of Grand Central Terminal. Years later he was back, serving as head painter when the ceiling was restored in 1945.
That might be no more than a footnote in Gulbrandsen’s own career, except that just like his grandfather, also named Charles, he also became a skilled muralist and restorationist. He even followed his grandfather to Grand Central, working on the crew restoring the ceiling in 1996.
While he was up there on the scaffolding, he was interviewed by a writer from the New Yorker magazine and might have pointed out what none of the millions who have looked up at the ceiling could see: Gulbrandsen’s parents’ names written under Pegasus’ wings. He says his grandfather had put them there in 1945 when the couple climbed the scaffolding to reveal their wedding plans.
Gulbrandsen was 12 when his grandfather died in 1974, but he did visit his studio and was personally introduced to the Grand Central ceiling. “One of the great memories of my life is being on my dad’s shoulders (inside the terminal’s great hall), with my grandfather there, pointing up to all the constellations,” he says.
He knew their bare lightbulb stars were intended to show off the miracle of electric power. “It represented something possible if you dreamed it. It set the bar pretty high, literally,” he says of his own ambitions.
Gulbrandsen’s grandfather did murals in landmark New York buildings such as the Bronx County Courthouse. Later, he did set designs for early TV variety shows, like Ed Sullivan’s. Gulbrandsen himself attended the Cooper Union art school on full scholarship. He studied painting, but immediately upon graduation in 1985 was hired by a restorationist working on Maxfield Parrish murals in Philadelphia.
A job restoring seven WPA-era murals by James Dougherty, the painter and award winning children’s book illustrator who made his home in Weston, brought him to Connecticut. Dougherty had done them in 1934 for the octagonal auditorium in Stamford High School. He says the city was about to discard them when a student rescued them from a dumpster.
Meanwhile, Gulbrandsen, who now lives in Woodbury and is a resident artist at Ridgefield’s new RPAC art center, was gaining commissions both as a muralist and copyist of classic paintings..
Prominently featured on his website is a six-foot-tall reproduction of “The Water Girl,” a painting by the 19th-century French artist Willem-Adolph Bougereau.
For another client, he did a pair of wall-size murals that were enlargements of animal paintings by the English artist George Stubbs.
For other clients, Gulbrandsen created murals of his own composition, some of them astounding in scale. For a New Canaan residence, he did a Serengeti Plain mural that wrapped around two walls. For a client relocating from Hong Kong, Gulbrandsen spent a year painting oriental harbor scenes throughout the apartment the client had bought in New York. Moving in, the client presented his girlfriend with the key to the apartment, in a box like an engagement ring.
All his work modes, restorations, reproductions, original murals, drew on Gulbrandsen’s technical skills. The “in painting” required for a restoration helped him understand the methods of painters like Stubbs. “It’s discovery,” he says. “You get to the nitty gritty. You walk in their shoes. It takes a little while to get comfortable.”
For the new abstract paintings that are most his own, Gulbrandsen says he goes to a “different place. It’s the distinction between poetry and prose.” They also take him back to his childhood.
He says he thinks of his representational work as being done in layers, like the acetate overlay illustrations he saw in World Book encyclodepias. He thinks the cosmic quality of his abstract work descends from his father. Another Charles, he did not become a painter. He was a mathematician who worked at IBM. But his passion and hobby was astronomy.
“He was constantly bringing home books about quantum particle theory and string theory. As I look back, it’s probably not a coincidence that a lot of my abstract work emanates from having luminous nebula and a luminous metric of interconnectivity. I don’t use Hubble space telescope images,” he says. “I’m subconsciously remembering them (the images from his father’s books).”
There are no bright star Pegasuses and Orions in Gulbrandsen’s abstractions. Instead, they are, as he says, nebulae of color or what might be close-ups of planets.
In one of his favorite small paintings, “Ascension,” twin chunks of rock appear to have broken off from their host planet and begun a journey into the unknown. The twins are surrounded by serpentine arches, bowing farewell.
“Ascension” is done in thick oil on a wood panel only 16 by 20 inches in size. Yet it plays huge, like the equally small and thickly painted “Brink.” If it’s a planet, it has elephant ear mountains.
In both, Gulbrandsen says, “I was interested in exposing the contrast between the ethereal atmosphere and a heavily textured, impastoed paint surface.”
At the other end of the scale is “Rising,” a three-panel 80-by-80 inch painting in which cottony nebulae float, or hang, in a curtain of cosmic vines. Another hallmark of his paintings, the vines are vertical and noduled. Once again, he has no problem when people tell him they look like nerve ganglions. Nerves after all are the body’s interior connectivity.
Another large painting and one of the few with a human image is “Out of the Blue,” a diptych in which the faces of two women appear like suns. The faces are painted masks that project from the surface. They are yin and yang, one high, one low. Gulbrandsen says the painting was partly inspired by the three sets of sisters in his family, including his own two daughters.
Several of his paintings are on display in a RPAC group show that runs to Sept. 20. In mid-summer, he had a solo show at the Rene Soto Gallery in Norwalk, which represents him. He says had intended to put a painting, “SEED,” on the invitation, but it sold before the exhibit opened.
Considered by many one of his strongest paintings, “SEED” is a swirl of nebulae, spawning a pair of purplish pods fed by heart-like arteries.