Broderick Morales
Biography
Painter, Born 1987, Palisades, New York
Educational Aim: To attend Fine Art Studies for a BFA at Bard College or NYU
Current Studio Practice:
Painter. Medium: Acrylic paintings on Strathmore paper
Scale: 8 x 4-feet to triptychs at 8 x 12-feet
Special Aesthetic and Life Experiences:
Brody Morales is a painter for whom scale, form and spatial relations reflect the physical and cognitive compensation he continues to achieve as he recovers from a severe accident.
Paintings such as his “Triptych 2006: Blue, Black, Green” 8 x 12-feet; were made in the early stages of his adaptation to a set of restrictions to his movement. This color triptych and accompanying black and white diptychs and triptychs all show the promise of Brody’s vision as a young painter.
As his friend and painting instructor, I would like to offer this observation of Brody’s work in the broader history of the aesthetics of American painting. As a student of George McNeil, a member of the Group of Eight of the New York Abstract Expressionists and Joe Stapleton a painter who showed at the fabled Stable Gallery of New York City, I am well acquainted with traditions of American abstract painting. In that light, I see Brody as a young artist whose vision springs from direct experience of rugged sports such as hunting and the emotional security of a rich family community.
As a result, his approach to painting is primarily expressionist but the wisdom of his spatial awareness far out-distances that natural, youthful ability to claim a voice of expressive ardor with clarity.
Since 2006 Brody has entered into a relationship with his materials that is experimental in execution through the application of paint “run-downs”, splashes, drips, spraying and drawing with paint on an 8-foot lengths of crème colored paper.
His most recent painting in the spring and early summer of 2007 now involve a vocabulary of shapes that evoke the heart, saw, comb, sea and linear points of perspective that merge foregrounds and distant space.
Brody’s approach to painting is in keeping with a comment made by Brice Marden in 1992 during the development of his “figurative” series of gestural and calligraphic paintings. Mr. Marden mentioned “the painter’s ethical conduct”. When I have the opportunity to speak with Brody about how he wishes to create this imagery, he is concerned with a purity of expression that he can feel with his entire being. For him, the fact of being and the relation of sensations to others represent a holistic sense of life that he is just now on the threshold of developing.