Born at the foot of The Priest in Virginia, Galen Frost Bernard is trying to paint his way back to the place he calls “the godhead.”
The peak that stood witness to his birth continually works itself into the work of this Asheville artist, an energetic night dweller whose vigorous paint strokes sometimes cut through the canvas.
People have told him they see many things and many places in the civilizations he creates in oil and acrylic — from the seething favela slums of Brazil to the precariously stacked seaside villages of Greece. Bernard just smiles, drawing the corners of his mouth toward his double-decker sideburns.
“I’m not painting those places, but I’m all for people having those tangible connections,” he said recently in his studio at Riverview Station, a hulking brick warren of artists’ quarters with work hung throughout its maze of hallways. “I’m not going to tell anyone that ‘no, that’s not a painting of that.’ I’ll say, ‘great eye.’
“People are going to get from it what they are,” he says. “I’m aiming loosely somewhere between glorified landfills and holy sites. I anchor them all in the infinite. It’s a really difficult place to aim at. But it’s just an aim. It’s just direction.”
In a tall, trapezoid-shaped studio full of secondhand furniture (and a giant box of Cheez-Its), Bernard paints large canvases mounted on a paint-splattered wall, standing on a blotted square of carpet that makes the long hours he works easier on his joints. He likes working late at night, when the world is slumbering and his thoughts don’t collide with the thoughts of others.
Bernard paints in many sizes, but he especially likes paintings that are “big enough to surround you,” he says. “When you’re surrounded by it, it’s like you’re in it. I like the idea of the work being a portal either out of yourself or into yourself.”
He could have as easily been talking about The Priest. The highest point in central Virginia’s Nelson County, the 4,000-foot mountain is a reference point for a county that didn’t get a stoplight until after Bernard left to attend Warren Wilson College. Bernard was born at its base, in a snowstorm, in a plastic-wrapped shed that his parents built onto the side of their tiny travel trailer.
His parents were part of the late 1970s back-to-the-land movement, leaving behind a life in Berkeley, California for one in “the middle of nowhere Virginia,” Bernard says. They bought 150 acres with a couple of other families near Massies Mill. Their son grew up playing in the woods with friends.
The Priest forms the backdrop of much of his work, including a project currently hanging in the studio. The mountain is discernable under the tangle of briars in threads of oil across the canvas.
Stairways drawn into much of his other work reference the Ghats he sat upon in Varanasi, India, as he watched priests celebrate the passage of the silk-clothed bodies on burning pyres by the Ganges River. There’s a lot of fire imagery in his work.
“I’m obsessed with mortality, the temporariness of our existence. Of the world being able to swallow us at any second,” Bernard says. “I’m pretty excited about disaster — floods, volcanoes, tornado swarms. Disaster strips away artifice and illuminates our commonality. Nature is the fuel for the creative ‘everything.’” He returns to Nelson County occasionally to breathe in his connection to the land.
“The way I paint is doing lots of instinctual, gestural releases that I then come back to define and tighten,” he says. “It’s a push-pull, back-and-forth — the looser work, then the tighter work, then the looser work.
“I like to work on several paintings at once because I stall out all the time. When I hit the wall and don’t know what to do next, I move on to other paintings. Working on other work helps me figure out the next step of what I was working on previously.
“I paint so much, and I’ve painted for so many years, that I’m constantly switching up. It’s part of my nature that if it’s not experimental, if it’s not exploring the other little ‘off ramp,’ then I feel stifled. So sometimes I’m flailing — big arm movements. Other times it’s just my wrist. It’s all about my mood.
“I try to be present enough to communicate where I’m at into the canvas at that moment, because I’m not so worried that that moment be the be-all, know-all of that painting, because I know that I’m going to layer moment after moment after moment.
“It’s all about birthing and sacrificing, creation and destruction, addition and subtraction. That’s kind of my specialty, this willingness to release.”
Galen Frost Bernard is part of a group show at The Satellite Gallery (55 Broadway St., Asheville) through October. The other artists are Brian Mashburn and Ted Harper. Visit galenfrostbernard.com to see more of his work.