San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
All’s fair in ‘Love & War’
Veteran painter Mark Bryce tackles universal themes in Oceanside Museum of Art exhibition
Mark Bryce isn’t particularly keen on what he calls the “digital age.” Sure, he sees the benefit in the troves of visual art available to view on the internet, instantly accessible with a few taps, clicks and swipes. But for the veteran painter, who has perfected a very specific method of brushwork, looking at his work on a screen just isn’t the same as looking at it in person. It’s a common misgiving among artists for sure, but for Bryce, it’s particularly pressing given the depth and techniques used in his work.
“I paint in an other-world manner, even though the ideas are very conceptual, social and spiritual,” Bryce says from his home in South Park. “If you actually look at the physical paintings, you get the
technical aspects, and it’s a bit unusual.”
One can forgive Bryce for speaking so boldly about his own work and techniques. After perfecting his craft for over 50 years,
he’s earned a bit of bragging rights. Perhaps more importantly, however, is that the techniques used in his paintings really are something to behold in person. With a brushwork technique that is a melding of older, classical forms, Bryce thinly spreads oil paints with an alchemical medium on panels. This, he says “reduces the need to fight the canvas.” It’s a method that one might see in the classical works hanging in the San Diego Museum of Art, but not so much in contemporary works.
“You just do something for decades and you figure out what works,” Bryce says. “It kind of just developed on its own. I used to work more on canvas but I don’t paint that big so the panels work very nicely.”
An assortment of these works will be on display at “Mark Bryce: Love & War,” an exhibition that opens at the Oceanside Museum of Art this weekend. While certainly classifiable as a realist painter, Bryce also combines figurative and surrealist elements that deal in themes of, to put it as simply as possible, the universality of the human condition.
“I think they present issues that are personal but also relate to where we are as human beings,” Bryce says. “A lot of the issues, and it doesn’t matter where you are, can be understood.”
“There’s hopefully a quiet hope in the work,” Bryce adds later. “Some of the works are playful and fun as well, making fun of myself and others. There are a lot of questions within it, because we have to keep asking questions so that we can come to some kind of understanding of self.”
And while those issues may seem obvious on the surface, Bryce brings a certain amount of subtlety and nuance to the finished piece. Issues such as sexism (“School Slate Boys” and “School Girl Fears,” both from 1999), racialism (“TRUTH” and “Truth,” from 2020) and Americanism (“The Heart of the Target” and “Uncle Sam,” both from 2011) all seem to deal in topics that are initially self-evident, but just as with Bryce’s painting techniques, there are layers here.
“I want people to draw their own understanding of that, and I don’t like to spell things out for people because it obfuscates the viewer’s need for introspection,” Bryce says when asked whether his work is rooted in a scrutiny of American exceptionalism. “We have ideals as human beings, much like the founding fathers did, but then we have reality.”
A descendent of a founding father — John Adams, to be exact — Mark Bryce was born in San Francisco into a highly artistic household. His father, Dr. Mayo Bryce, worked as an arts educator at the State Department and entrenched Mark in the arts.
While Mark says he was naturally drawn to painting figurative works, it was when he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts that he began to attempt other types of styles and techniques.
After college, Bryce bounced around New York City and even spent some time in Pennsylvania with Andrew Wyeth, arguably one of the most famous realist painters. Bryce describes his early work in the ’70s as “cooler, crisper,” with paintings of urban scenes and social narratives. He showed his work at a number of galleries around this time before moving back to San Francisco and, eventually, to San Diego.
The Oceanside Museum of Art exhibition is an extension of a 2017 showcase at the Centro Cultural Tijuana (CECUT), which marked the first time the domed institution had curated a solo show of an American artist in its nearly 40year history.
“There was a lot of trauma around that time,” says Bryce, referring to the Trump-era policies that led to unrest along the U.s.mexico border. “I think (CECUT) thought it would be a very healing experience and good for people to see an American who’s looking at things like this.”
The Oceanside iteration of “Love & War” collects over 20 years worth of paintings and was initially scheduled to open last year but had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s tempting to take the exhibition, made up of 39 paintings, as a grand survey of Bryce’s career or even a retrospective. And while Bryce himself says all the paintings develop “from a question or an idea or a problem or something I perceive,” it’s unfair to lump them together as all being thematically related.
“They come from the internal processing of worldly issues,” says Bryce, who often meditates for artistic inspiration. “I then put elements together to construct a stage. It’s like drama, but you don’t really do it consciously. It develops in an unconscious process and culminates usually with a successful painting.”
That process can take up to a month or longer for a single painting, but at this stage in Bryce’s career, he doesn’t seem to be too worried about time.
“Painting is like breathing. You just have to keep breathing,” says Bryce. “It’s not market-oriented or trend-oriented, it’s personal and on a developmental basis.”
And after 50 years and dozens of shows, Bryce says there doesn’t seem to be any sense in stopping now.
“I’ve been doing this forever. It’s in my blood. That’s just the way it is,” Bryce says. “Writers write, painters paint.”