rt Interview Online Magazine is pleased to present Steve Breerwood, the winner of the Art Interview - 6th International Online Artist Competition. His award winning realist series “Human Resources” is an analogy of the social commentary of the 19th century painters Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet. Drawing from his personal experiences of working at Wal-Mart, Breerwood has managed to transpose the depictions of peasantry of past centuries into a modern day version of the “worker genre”.

Born in 1979 Breerwood studied painting and photography at the Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana and received a Masters of Fine Arts from Florida State University in 2006. The works of Lucian Freud influenced Breerwood during his undergraduate studies and much of his current work focuses on portraiture, through which he attempts to document his perception of the world. Breerwood works as an Assistant Professor at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.

Art Interview: What university did you attend?

Steve Breerwood: I received my undergraduate degree in painting and photography at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana. It is a small school in a small town. I then went on to receive a Masters of Fine Arts from Florida State University in 2006. I’m working there now but my family and I will be moving to Oklahoma where I have received an Assistant Professorship position teaching art.

Steve Breerwood Dennis 2002 Oil on Panel 6 x 2 feet

Steve Breerwood: In undergraduate school my work was formal and modernist oriented. Graduate school taught me to think conceptually about the content of my art.

Art Interview: Were there any professors that had a major impact on your work?

Steve Breerwood: Yes, both my painting and print-making professors gave me a lot of good input.

Art Interview: Do you have gallery representation?

Steve Breerwood: Tallahassee only has two reputable places where art is shown and those are both classified as museums. There’s not a big art scene here, so there aren’t any commercial galleries to show in.

Art Interview: Do you plan to exhibit in galleries in the future?

Steve Breerwood: Yes, my ultimate goal is to market my work. Lately, I’ve been doing portraits, getting back to basics. Most of the work I’ve sold in the past has been portraits for commission. Now that I have a bit more leverage as an artist, I’m trying to market my own style of portraiture.

Steve Breerwood Phil Gleason 2007 Oil on Canvas 16 x 20 inches

Art Interview: Are you painting from photographs or from life?

Steve Breerwood: I like to use models for my preliminary drawings. I don’t like to draw purely from photos, because I feel like a photocopy machine when I do. But it’s hard to get people in sync with my schedule, and I feel bad asking my friends to sit for hours on end, so I often wind up painting from photographs.

Art Interview: What technical aspects do you focus on in your work?

Steve Breerwood: I focus mainly on surface textures, surface quality, and color. My painting style concentrates on the surface of the artwork, so it doesn’t matter if the subject is from life or from a photo. I’m currently using a geometric approach to applying the paint and non-naturalistic colors. I’m not representing things naturally, therefore I can use photography as a reference point.

Art Interview: How large are the portraits you’re doing now?

Steve Breerwood Jason P. Daigle 2003 Oil on Panel 24 x 14 inches

Art Interview: How long do they usually take to complete?

Steve Breerwood: It generally takes me a couple of weeks, because I tend not to work straight through. My process takes a while, because I’m building up layers, and each layer needs to have time to dry before the next layer is added.

There tends to be a lot of texture in my work, and it’s always a matter of control versus surface. The more you control the paint, the flatter the surface becomes; it’s about managing control versus giving the paint what it wants.

Art Interview: How do you choose the colors of your palette?

Steve Breerwood: I use a lot of glazes and scumbles over a tone background. I begin with middle to dark gray prime support so the canvas is gray to begin with. Then I draw out the image in pencil and do transparent washes over the drawing for the shadow planes. It is almost like an ink-wash effect with Payne’s Gray. Then I’ll go in and add very saturated warm colors into the direct light areas and scumble transparent cool colors in the ambient areas.

Formally, I’m trying represent light in all its intensity. There’s a limit to how intense it can be recreated with oil paint, compared to the actual light itself. I concentrate on the contrast between light and dark, warm and cool, thick and thin, and intense versus neutral.

Steve Breerwood: I try to get most of the psychological or emotional content in my work across through color. I often use a secondary acidic palette that contains quite a bit of greens, purples, oranges and yellows.

Art Interview: Is this similar to the palette you used for your Human Resources series?

Steve Breerwood Jammed Bailer, After Rivera 2006 Oil on Canvas 77 x 66 inches

Art Interview: How did you come up with the idea for the Human Resources series?

Steve Breerwood: I worked at Wal-Mart for two years. I call that my ‘internship into the real world’. When I came to grad school, I was really struggling to find content to paint that I thought would be relevant to a viewer, and was avoiding reference to my own personal experiences because I figured that would be sentimental, and nobody would care. However, a number of teachers encouraged me to use my own experiences, so I tried to take those and relate them in a more universal sense, which an outsider could relate to. I took my experience of working at Wal-Mart and turned it into ‘worker-genre’ paintings.

Steve Breerwood Maintenence 2005 Oil on Canvas 67 x 52 inches

Steve Breerwood: Yes

Art Interview: Why did you choose to reference art history so literally?

Steve Breerwood: By referencing historical paintings so literally, I’m trying to say as blatantly as possible, that I’m making a comparison to the past. Again, it’s the modern versus the timeless, or modern versus past.

Art Interview: The artists that you referenced were making social commentaries about the working class. The themes of your Wal-Mart paintings are very much about the lower working class of American society today. Were you consciously making a statement by doing that?

Steve Breerwood Zoning After Millet 2006 Oil on Canvas 52 x 67.5 inches

Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1875) The Gleaners 1857 Oil on Canvas 110 x 84 cms Musee D'Orsay, Paris, France

Art Interview: You have also chosen the Parliament as a subject for painting, can you explain what that was about?

Steve Breerwood: I was watching the news one day and saw a brawl between a few politicians in America (I believe it was on the Today Show); and I thought, ”well, there’s a subject for painting.”. So, I went searching for stills of this particular fight but I couldn’t find any and I realized there are too many lawyers in America for anything like that to become public domain. But in the process of searching for that particular fight, I did find newsworthy videos and photos of Parliament fights in the Ukraine and Iran and Taiwan. I chose them to make a broad statement about humanity itself. What I’m trying to say is, we are animals with selfish drives and desires, and when ever we ignore that fact, we become capable of some pretty despicable behavior. In this case, a politician, someone who is supposed to be representing the people, is behaving so poorly.

Art Interview: Would you consider yourself an artist who is focusing on social commentary?

Steve Breerwood: All of my ideas lately have dealt with the basic premise of human nature, or the human experience. All of the social issues I’m dealing with are an attempt to get to the core of what it means to be human in the modern, or, if you will, post-modern period we live in today.

Art Interview: Why do you focus on figurative art?

Steve Breerwood: It’s just a personal preference which goes all the way back to when I was in high school and wanted to be a comic book artist.

Art Interview: When you were attending undergraduate school, did they put heavy focus on working from models?

Steve Breerwood: I took only one figure drawing class and the rest of the five years were mostly open-ended, open-theme assignments. But I kept coming back to portraiture and the figure on my own.

Steve Breerwood Jeff Crawford 2007 Oil on Canvas 17.5 x 21 inches

Steve Breerwood: My early work was all done from photos, and the focus wasn’t really on the paint. At that time I was still attempting to get an accurate representation of the subject. My focus has grown well beyond that of my initial early life-size paintings. I now find them flat boring because my sensibilities have changed. The studies of the figures are interesting enough, but you can get that same experience from the photos or from the reproduction of the paintings. There’s not as much focus on the paint handling as I do today. Ever since that point I’ve been trying to put more into the paint, and focus more on what it means to make a painting.

Art Interview: I’m curious, how were you making those esthetic choices and why your focus has changed?

Steve Breerwood: I was actually a photographer in my undergraduate studies,or at least I was going around calling myself a photographer. I decided later to take up painting. Whatever may be a success with those six-foot portraits was all done with a camera. All of the choices I made about lighting and posing were done with a base in photography.

Art Interview: How do you see what you’re doing now differs?

Steve Breerwood: My philosophy of painting is becoming more about the psychological processes of an artist. That’s the main difference between photography and painting. The camera is built to emulate human ocular vision, but a painting, on the other hand, is made from scratch, and it’s whatever the artist makes of it. In that sense the artists are building a new reality from their own imagination. The painting is a document of the artist’s psychological processes; where photography is merely a document of life. I’m trying to let more of my own, psychological process become evident in my finished work.

Art Interview: How long did it take for you to realize this direction?

Lucian Freud Reflection Self-portrait 1985 Oil on Canvas 51 x 56 cm

Art Interview: You were working directly from the photograph, but you were laying down points of color that weren’t necessarily seen in the photograph.

Steve Breerwood: Right....

Art Interview: Those paintings do contain brush stroke; it isn’t as if you were trying to hide the brush stroke like a photo-realist painter. How has your brush-stroke changed?

Steve Breerwood: It’s become more geometric. In the portraits I’m doing now, I build faces out of very rectilinear brush-strokes, and rectilinear planes. My brush-stroke is rectangular, or if there’s a curve, it’s more like a curved bar of paint.

Art Interview: What are your plans for marketing your work?

Steve Breerwood: Now that I have a full-time teaching job I’m going to try landing one-man shows of my big ideas, like the "Human Resources" series, in metropolitan areas like New York City. In addition, I will try to market my portraits in Oklahoma City while I am there.

Steve Breerwood: I teach oil painting, watercolors and drawing classes.

Art Interview: How did you land that job?

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This oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Steve Breerwood on July 21, 2007. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany, and Tallahassee, Florida, USA and was conducted by Brendan Davis for Art Interview Online Magazine.