Interview with Bryan Prillwitz

O-A: What is art to you? Is creating an urge, necessity or maybe an incontournable, essential way of life?
Bryan Prillwitz: I think that the flesh and blood in my paintings is of Dionysus, of desire, as well as of a tortured feeling of diminishment, or denial. Gender, race, and class conflict come together almost as one memory, that is of the flesh, or as a clash of the flesh.
I intend for my paintings to impart to the viewer a sublime sense of awe, that is, an impression of the power of beauty and of the flesh, and a sensitivity for that which within us is most vulnerable, which makes us visceral, autonomous and individual.
.

O-A: What wouldn’t you do without art? What did you discover, achieve with it?
Bryan Prillwitz: How Venus was ephemerally created from the foam and the waves of the ocean. Discover how the senses as are the outlets of the soul, to revive that primordial Greek time when male and female lived in amorous attraction with no predetermination of gender.
That which is beautiful in nature is that which is most mysterious, like that dark jungle river ride into the orange sun, mystery, destiny, and happy ending.
.

O-A: What was the most interesting statement you heard about your work?
Bryan Prillwitz: “This would never be something like you would see on a Cosmopolitan Magazine cover, but always much like what you see in Vogue.”
.

O-A: How do you search for inspiration and themes for your work?
Bryan Prillwitz: Recall one by one the fascinations of my youth. Astronauts, Jelly fish, alligators, King Kong with those attacking helicopters. The mystical and physical prowess of the Tyger. Landsknechte, pikes clenched in those gnarly mitts, carved out with a steady, dark pencil, like a woodcut by Durer. The vicious yet vicarious crocodile goddess of India carved in granite. Mamawundi washing up the little boy founds precious body in the Congo River, looking out for wherever ever does go that little girl lost. The three monkeys always do tell us what to do.
.

O-A:What do you usually talk about with your collectors?
Bryan Prillwitz:
“Can you make me just like this?”
“I love your loose brush strokes.”
Typically, a certain desired shade to color jackets, boots, eye shapes.
The time I used lush violet instead of black for her hair, when the young lady collector came by to see the drawing she got giddy.