Brad Winchester by William Shearburn Gallery

BRAD WINCHESTER

By Jeannette Cooperman

The first stoplight in St. Clair, Missouri, was a big deal. “And then we got our first McDonald’s,” Brad Winchester recalls, the thrill of it still in his voice. He grew up in the shelter of that sweet rural Missouri town, a small place where the days repeated themselves without question.

“I thought I knew how the world began, how it was going to end, and everything in between,” he says now, wryly. In high school, though, he was drawn to art and it became a refuge, a place where he could express himself, ask the questions nobody voiced, explore a larger world.

After graduation, Winchester left home to study at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago There, his world broke open, and he painted his questions into being. All those years of feeling like an outsider? Artists were outsiders in a meaningful way, observing and reflecting the world others forgot to question.

Next he moved to Seattle, where the ethereal beauty of the Pacific Northwest the mists, bright mosses, rare bright blue skies, crazy sunsets gave him a new palette. There, he began exploring process and systems. Gentle and diffident by nature, he looked for ways to insert himself into his art without pushing or shoving. What he cared about was thinking deeply.

In 2014, he left two-dimensional canvases behind and started tearing linen apart. Belgian linen, the sine qua non of the classical oil painter. It had this texture brush strokes came alive against its surface. And it was flaxen, straight from the earth, ripe for deconstruction and reappropriation.

At first, he had intended only to tear the stuff apart. Separated and dyed, it curled back to life, taking on a life of its own that was hugely interesting. Then he returned to the work, wanting the texture back, the compositions more complicated. “I was learning to listen and pay attention to what the work is telling me,” he says, “and have a conversation with the material.”

That conversation led him to the loom, and to a process that was deliberately laborious. His dad had retired from a Chrysler plant; his granddad from a Ford plant. Telling people he made art had always sounded a little vague and lightweight by comparison. So he focused hard on the labor itself, working by hand, taking no shortcuts. Now, he makes the process part of the expression.

First, Winchester rolls the linen onto PVC and teases out ten threads at a time, placing them on a loom studded with nails and tying off the threads. For shuttles, he uses the metal transition strips that cover door thresholds. Once the horizontal strands have been threaded through the vertical, he bleaches the entire work, neutralizes the bleach with hydrogen peroxide, blasts the loom with a hose, then dyes the strands, repeating the cycle anywhere from six to twenty times until he sees before him the palette lodged in his head. By then, the nails are rusty, and he’s pushed the loom to the edge, where it might snap at any moment and destroy everything. That risk braved, he uses PVA sizing, which is like rabbit skin glue, to secure the work. He lays down some acrylic paint, which dries fast and lets him work things out. Now comes a big skim of oil paint, in some places almost obliterating the weave.

“It’s this give-and-take behavior I like, additive and reductive,” he explains. “I’m interested in material reliance, the fact that one thing couldn’t exist without the other.”

Acrylics are plastic, and they look like plastic. But the oils are matte he doesn’t use linseed oil and glowing. Placed next to each other, the two mediums offer a sharp juxtaposition the same clash Winchester senses between the digital world and nature’s wilderness. “I want people to wonder what’s going on,” he says, grinning. “Bewilderment is always beneficial.”

Once the paint dries, it is time to carefully, tentatively remove the linen strands from the loom, stretch them, and place them in a permanent frame. This, he admits to fetishizing, hyper-focusing on the joinery to make sure his table saw is perfectly positioned and there are no gaps in his lap joints. “Most carpenters would find me ridiculous,” he says. “But this is the time when I get to play like I’m a woodworker!” Because milled wood sometimes wobbled, or had such an obvious grain that it looked “craftsy,” he learned how to mill the wood himself. In Seattle, he used a yellow cedar that glowed. Now that he is back in Missouri, he has discovered soft, pale, fine-grained basswood.

Being called a fabric artist always startles Winchester, who was trained as a painter before turning to weaving “One of the oldest technologies in the world,” it has an integrity missing from today’s digital tech, pixelated and binary, underscoring separation. “We already have this tendency to see the world as this or that: yes/no; boy/girl; good/bad; black/white,” he points out. It’s a shorthand our brain uses, but it hasn’t served us well, because “the actual world doesn’t operate like that.”

His earlier works included pixelated hurricanes, oil on linen, made from satellite images and contrasting our digital lives with what is actually happening on Earth. Later pieces have names like Bar Codes and Conduit and Speculating. “Everybody is using tech they don’t understand,” he says. “This is a little bit of a resistance, a commentary. I reference the digital world, but there’s not a single inch of any of these pieces that I do not fully understand; that I am not intimate with. I downloaded those hurricane satellite images a long time ago; these days, the tech-iest I get is my table saw.”

A recent work, Head to Tail, is a weird, alien creature, slithering and snakelike, hailing from another dimension. At vertical intervals, slick-smooth gradient bars divide the “body,” their acrylic paint sanded and repainted and sanded again until the weave is invisible. At the base, threads drape over the frame as a horse’s tail would. “If I pull the threads at the bottom, everything goes wonky because of the left-right zig-zag,” he explains. “I thought, ‘Why does everything have to be pulled tight anyway? Make it more animal, more alive, as it hits the bottom of the frame and curls around.”

Winchester’s artworks land somewhere between sculpture and painting; he calls them wall objects and sees them as anything but static. They grow inside imagination, and they are still giving him new ideas. “As long as I listen to the work,” he says, “I will have something to say back to it. There are lots of things I’m thinking about.” Lots of questions begging to be asked.

Jeannette Cooperman is a staff writer for The Common Reader, a journal of the essay based at Washington University. Her doctorate is in American studies, and her master's focused on symbol and meaning in the visual arts. Author of seven books, she has won national awards for investigative journalism and cultural analysis, and her work has been cited in Best American Essays.