San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Boundary-defying artist made one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces
About 62 years ago, Daniel Brush, a 13-year-old from Cleveland, stood in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London having a formative experience.
His mother had brought him there as part of a European tour intended to, as he later put it, open up his eyes. The visit to the Victoria and Albert certainly had that effect, especially the jewelry rooms and one particular ancient gold Etruscan bowl decorated with an esoteric technique called granulation.
“I didn’t know what granulation was then,” Brush told the New York Times in 2012, “but I saw a gold bowl with a bunch of tiny balls on it. I thought, ‘I have to make something like that in my lifetime.’ ”
If that was some kind of destiny, Brush had by the time of that interview fulfilled it and then some. He had become an artist known — at first to a small group of cognoscenti, but gradually to a wider circle — for one-of-a-kind works defined by their detail and the devotion that went into them. His jewelry was often intended not so much to be worn as to be cherished. His small sculptures drew comparisons to Fabergé eggs for their delicacy and their small-scale artistry. He made works inspired by rituals of the Tendai Buddhist monks of Japan and works inspired by watching his son dip animal crackers into milk.
“He crosses boundaries certainly more than anyone I can think of,” Holly Hotchner, then the director of the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, said in 2012, when that museum mounted “Daniel Brush: Blue Steel Gold Light,” the first wide survey of his work.
Brush died Nov. 26 in the Manhattan borough of New York City. He was 75.
His wife, Olivia Brush, confirmed the death. No cause was given.
Brush was by choice a wellkept secret in the art world for many years, spurning the gallery scene, commissions and dealer representation. Collectors who heard of his work could come calling at the loft in the Flatiron district of Manhattan where he and his wife, also an artist, lived and worked, but “it’s often ‘no sale’ because he requires a personal connection and a sense that buyers will be sensitive caretakers of his art,” the Times wrote in 2012.
A 1998 exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian
American Art Museum in Washington, “Daniel Brush: Gold Without Boundaries,” brought him new visibility. But even after that, articles about him tended to describe him as “hermitlike,” “elusive,” “enigmatic” and “reclusive.”
He had a morning ritual of sweeping the loft for several hours, “just as a Buddhist monk might sweep the temple ground in meditation,” the Times wrote in 2020. The loft held antique scissors, an 18th century lathe and assorted other vintage objects and machines, a testament to Brush’s self-taught mastery of techniques like the aforementioned granulation — visitors who took a magnifying glass to some of his jewelry and other pieces saw that they were adorned with strings of grainlike bits of gold.
“What struck me in his work is his demanding nature and his ability to work gold, aluminum and steel with absolute precision,” Nicolas Bos, CEO of Van Cleef & Arpels, a French jewelry company, wrote in the preface to the 2019 book “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture.” “He claims to be a goldsmith, a jeweler and a metalworker, but I think, before everything, there’s a sort of magician within him.”
Daniel David Brush was born Jan. 22, 1947, in Cleveland. His parents, Arthur and Clara (Gross) Brush, owned a clothing store for children.
After the inspirational trip to Europe when he was 13, he went on to earn a bachelor‘s degree in fine arts at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in 1969 and a master’s in fine arts at the University of Southern California in 1971. At Carnegie Mellon he met a fellow student, Lynn Alpert; they married in 1969, and she began using the name Olivia Brush.
In addition to his wife, Brush is survived by their son, Silla.