Brent Cotton: Back at It
After a challenging summer, Montana painter Brent Cotton has returned to his studio to experiment with paint.
Summers in Montana are famously beautiful. But the summer of 2019 is one painter Brent Cotton would like to forget. Everything was going smoothly until, like a flash, it wasn’t. “I just remember this whitehot pain right at the top of my head. I knew something was wrong pretty much right away,” he says, recounting what turned out to be the beginning of devastating one-two punch. First it was shingles, and then Bell’s palsy, which causes a facial paralysis. “That was it for me. My summer was pretty much gone as I was resting up.”
In the midst of all this, Cotton had work due to the Eiteljorg Museum for the Quest for the West and his studio time was not going well. “I wasn’t sure if I was even going to get those works done. It was painful to paint and I was still recuperating, and mostly it was just hard to concentrate,” he says. “But somehow I got them done and shipped.”
Months later at the Quest for the West, Cotton was on the mend and feeling much better, though he still had some lingering paralysis on one side of his face. But, more than that, he was struggling with the work he had sent to the exhibition. Artist’s tend to be a doubtful bunch when it comes to their own work, but he had serious concerns on the quality of his pieces. These were concerns only he had, though, because on the last night of the Quest’s opening weekend, Cotton not only sold all of his submitted pieces, but he won the Victor Higgins Award for his body of work. “That award was the uplift I needed at that point. I wasn’t sure any of them were worthy, but the award made me realize I should have trusted the paintings,” Cotton says.
Back in Montana, and almost fully
recovered, the artist has returned to his studio with a vengeance and once again his palette is full of wet paint. His new show, an exhibition of miniature works, will open November 25 at Trailside Galleries in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. “One of the things I love about small works shows is that I get to paint these little gems, and they’re fun to paint. I get to experiment and include things I wouldn’t normally paint,” he says, suggesting he was exploring ideas related to still life and portraiture. “It’s fun for me to offer things that my collectors have never seen before.”
One of his bigger experiments is, after finishing a painting, to take the extra paint and apply it to a new panel. He’ll do this with a wide palette knife and just scrape the paint on, regardless of the color. All he’s doing is laying down an abstract base, something to build a future painting on later. You can see this background layer in one of his new works, In the Moment, which shows a figure silhouetted in the reflections of a stream.
“This one was an experimentation in two ways, one being the minimalism. It’s just the subject matter there in a simple silhouette in the light created by the water. It’s deceptively simple when you see it because you can see every layer,” he says. “The other experiment is the paint itself. At the end of the day I would have all these paint scrapings on my palette and I started to think of ways I could use them. So I would take these mixtures and just smear them on the surface to create a texture. It would create this interesting abstract background. Sometimes I would do some glazing to unify the layers. It was a simple application of paint, but it was effective and I was pleased at how it turned out.”
Cotton says one of the aspects that he enjoys about art, and wants to imbue within his own work, is how paint takes on different meanings depending on how far the viewer is standing from it—from a distance a scene is clearly evident and detail is present, but up close every brushstroke reveals how the scene was constructed. “It’s fun to dissect and decipher the approach of the artist,” he adds.
Other works in the new show include August on Kootenai Creek, a mesmerizing river scene featuring Cotton’s son as he’s fishing for cutthroat trout near their home, and Sundown’s Embrace, a sunset scene with remarkable oranges and dramatic light piercing through trees on a riverbank.
“For Sundown’s Embrace it was all about the texture, which is pretty apparent when you get up close and see the paint in the sky and water. Here, again, I took scrapings and smeared them around to help capture the light,” he says. “Simple, but bold…that’s what I’m looking for.”