Géza Brunow was born in Berlin, Germany of Yugoslavian Gypsy descent but thanks to a childhood spent largely on the move as a “Military Brat," the geographical and cultural influences in his works are diverse.
Brunow's frst offcial artistic gig came unexpectedly while working as an art crew technician at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts when the museum asked him to paint a large scale "period" mural for the Cindy Sherman exhibition at the Walker Art Center. Although educated in journalism, he left those pursuits in 1994 to dedicate himself fulltime to painting.
Prior to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and a few years thereafter, Brunow lived and worked in New Orleans for nearly a decade, a place whose mythology and visual landscapes deeply influenced him. Using water-based pigments, inks and oils in unorthodox ways on paper and canvas, Brunow’s lush, metaphysical paintings echo the same vision-quests taken by painters and writers of magical realism, from Odilon Redon to Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
Brunow just completed his frst book entitled, Once Upon A While Ago - an illustrated series of vignettes featuring the ink-on-paper adventures of his Acadian werewolf character, King-4-A-Day. Brunow currently lives in Pensacola, only three hours drive from New Orleans on I-10, depending on which way the wind blows.
My paintings develop from a unique skill set that often makes the work I create more like an intuitive tableau of different subconscious ideas than a premeditated exercise. It is an organic process in which I am more of a conduit for the visual message than a trained or untrained artist working from an established set of rules or criteria to paint something literal. This involves a kind of soul-powered "Rorschach" viewing of other worlds where I observe the pause between two events and attempt to accurately translate and document this place of surreal interim with a brush into visual essays. I rarely know what will emerge on the surface. I use whatever media will best demonstrate the most compelling imagery for the events that I have witnessed.
To me, what is literal is nothing more than a construct using readily-identifable symbols. Instead, I prefer to view the substrate that supports the facade we all tend to view as real. I purposely resist painting from life and view things in the slipstream using emotion instead of sight. This medium is like a tunnel which I'm allowed to enter and that helps me to decipher the things that fll me with both a sense of fear and wonder. The paintings become snapshot remains of this dialogue--metaphysical portals that ferry the viewer into my own strange little worlds of magic and mayhem.