‘Divine connection with the natural world’

On Saturday, Aug. 24 and Sunday, Aug. 25, between 12 and 3 p.m., the Bay Area Friends of Fine Arts Gallery at the Gillette House in downtown Sayville’s Gillette Park, will be exhibiting works of Long Island landscapes by Jonathan Van Brunt.

Created in both oil and acrylic, the scenes captured by Van Brunt are transient yet omniscient in their carnal knowledge of the beauty and sheer capacity of nature on Long Island.

Born and raised in Freeport, Nassau County, Van Brunt is the youngest of seven and cites the influence his family had on his decision.

“From my parents’ collection of illustrated books to the countless record albums and magazines belonging to [my] brothers and sisters, visual art was never out of reach at home,” said Van Brunt.

Studying printmaking at the Maine College of Art and developing an interest in materials through the process of traditional etching and lithography, Van Brunt went on to graduate school at Ohio University School of Art, where he integrated his fascination of materials into large, abstract painted wood pieces.

In these pieces, Van Brunt focused on fragmented compositions using found objects. Moving back to Long Island, Van Brunt developed an appreciation for the “hidden landscapes” of the area through his explorations of the state and county parks with his two children.

“The vast expanses of the Long Island Sound and the Atlantic Ocean combined with the spiked grass and branches hugging the small creeks and ponds throughout the island became the perfect vehicle for my paintings and offered the opportunity to celebrate the local landscape,” said Van Brunt.

The development into a landscape painter came through “trial and error.”

“I was an abstract painter for most of my formal training, and my focus was creating images that explored the formal layout of the picture plane using expressionist brushwork and found objects. I enjoyed working, and I would spend hours in my studio working on paintings and experimenting with different brushes and tools to paint with. I was open to trying different ways of applying paint, using the opposite end of a brush, rags, or paint directly applied from the tube,” said Van Brunt.

While researching an assignment on Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School of Painters, Van Brunt characterized the given perception of his subject matter as “appearing overly sentimental and lacking depth.”

“I soon discovered that while those artists wanted to document the land around them, they also had a divine connection with the natural world. This resulted in pieces that were impressive as renderings but also very dramatic in an abstract way, especially when it came to skies and storm clouds. To me, it was an obvious conclusion that I would use the landscape as inspiration to make pictures that incorporated the uninhibited textures in nature, but followed the natural order of composition,” said Van Brunt.