Will Bruno, who lives and works at an off-grid cabin in Abiquiú, New Mexico, connects the natural and unnatural landscapes of modern life within his paintings.
1.
I drive from Santa Fe to Abiquiú to visit the studio and cabin of painter Will Bruno. Will meets me at the parking lot of Mamacita’s Pizzeria, an Italian restaurant on the side of US-84. He is waiting in a silver truck with his dog, Raymond, and asks me to follow them back to the cabin, down dirt roads that snake off in every direction. Signs are small and sun-bleached.
Several minutes later, we arrive at Will’s small wooden cabin. The structure has a green metal roof and green trim. The land is sparsely populated with sagebrush and piñon trees, but my overall impression is of a cabin encircled by space, then mountains, then sky. The sense of being beneath the sky is palpable.
Will opens the front door and Raymond brushes past my calf, wagging his tail. The ceiling, walls, and floor are all made of wood. A hanging fruit basket holds three oranges, a lime. On the top of a mini-fridge is a pile of sun hats, fishing hats, baseball caps. A wool navy blanket lies neatly across the bed. From the large back window, I see the blue outline of Georgia O’Keeffe’s favorite mountain, Pedernal.
2.
Will pulls up a chair across from a wall of paintings in various stages of completion—a swath of gray dripping down a pink canvas, church ruins divided from a mountain by pale sea, a purple rock formation above another purple rock formation.
“I did several hikes and painted a bunch of landscape paintings. They’re all individual paintings to me, but I hung them on my wall in the order I made them. Over time, narratives start to develop, themes start to develop, but only after I start a lot of paintings does an overarching theme emerge.”
This past winter, Will decided to return to areas of New Mexico that the National Forest Service closed last summer after a controlled burn went wrong and fires destroyed more than 220 structures, 341,000 acres, and sixty-two million trees.
“The trees were just so expressive. Really dark and haunting.”
Will was particularly interested in the collision of the Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon fires. He talked to a woman who lived at that juncture. Her experience had been surreal. The landscape around her home was devastated, her community was in ruins, but the interior of her house was unchanged.
3.
I notice light streaming through Will’s windows. All the red curtains are pushed to the side. On the back porch, a brown leather rocking chair faces the mountains.
“I wanted to try to figure out a way to take canvases to paint oil on into the backcountry, do multi-day trips, visit areas that maybe haven’t been painted in that way, and focus on creating a sort of poetic journal of the experience of creating the paintings.”
On one long hike, Will observed a woodpecker knocking against a burned tree. The bird sensed plant and insect life beneath the surface, something Will couldn’t see.
He considered including the woodpecker in a painting but decided against it.
“I wanted to use a woodpecker as a starting point, a conceptual underpinning to this design feature. Designing the composition, that’s the fun of it, right? So for whatever reason, I thought of a wooden duck.”
As we talk, I spot a stack of ten National Geographic magazines from the late 1970s on top of a plastic bin of art supplies. Each issue has topics printed on its spine. The September 1977 edition lists: Leonardo, California’s Northern Coast, Salt, Giraffes, and Amber.
So many connections appear when you place seemingly separate ideas next to each other.
4.
I look at the finished piece, Midnight Fire.
The painting depicts a landscape of burned trees. They mostly retain the shape of living trees, but every branch is bare and some are missing pieces. A golden duck decoy perches on a burnt branch. Two figures stretch their arms out like wings. A sun sets over water.
I’m reminded of how unevenly wood burns, the ways we attempt to manipulate nature, and the destruction that often comes with those attempts… how “controlled burns” become real fires. I pause over the figures and setting sun. I think about the difference between light and fire.
Will included a text block at the bottom of the painting.
“I wanted to design the composition as if it were an illustration from a folk tale with a text block across the bottom. As the painting developed so did the news cycles announcing AI’s emergence into content creation. I had been enjoying the effect of using text without spaces in other paintings. I gave ChatGPT a description of the image and asked for a line of text back in the form of a password. The stylized text across the bottom is essentially the poetic answer it gave.”
I make out only a few of the words: fire / flowing / dark.
