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name
Steve Breerwood
media
painting
education
Nicholls State University
BA Painting, Photography, 2002
Florida State University
MFA Studio Art, 2006
phone
850.575.5159
web page
The humble worker and the dehumanization of his job is a classic subject of realism. My current series examines the recent face of American workers as seen from my own perspective. The content of these paintings is based in my personal experience working for two years under the Wal-Mart Corporation. The figural compositions allude to classic worker genre paintings of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The purpose of this is to affirm the timeless nature of this particular aspect of human experience. Also, I hope that by calling to mind images of lower-class workers from the past, the viewer will reflect on our modern state of “progress.” The corporation itself appears in these paintings through inanimate forms such as merchandise, printed displays, and surveillance cameras.
My work functions as a visual journal. In that sense it is documentation. However this is not the objective documentation of reality that the camera will give, but rather a subjective record of a human being’s perspective. Every stroke of paint is a struggle between the conscious mind’s desire for objectivity, the subconscious mind’s desire to see what it wants, and motor control processes of the body. The finished painting is a final compromise - an expression of how a human being sees his world.