Larry Bracegirdle page

From Magazin Art (Spring 2007) courtesy of the publisher.

Larry Bracegirdle: Radiating Hearth and Home

Larry Bracegirdle paints warm luscious interiors that make you radiate with a sense of hearth and home. His interior pieces are not modern. They usually consist of the rooms, hallways and staircases of homes that were built before the 1940s.

They are rich with the colour of old woodwork, panelling and oriental rugs. "I was influenced by the décor of my grandparents' house. Even now I can remember my grandmother's living room and how that impacted on my sensing the light coming in through the window. My grandfather was probably smoking so there would be smoke in the air, a grate in the floor for the furnace. When I come across a house like that I am immediately inspired."

Bracegirdle also likes painting interiors for the quality of their light. "Interior light is more interesting. Maybe it's the visual imprinting or that in the interior you have all these objects that people use so there is the potential for triggering the imagination."

As you might suspect with someone who loves old homes, Bracegridle primarily works in oils. "Oils appeal to me because they give you the most control and it's a sturdy medium. It's sensual."

Self-taught, Bracegirdle has been painting for almost forty years and in that time he has painted almost all the subjects you can ask for: horses, landscapes, still lifes and even the odd marinescape. I've tried everything over the years, a lot of acrylics. I've dabbled in watercolours and pastels because pastels can be built up in a manner that is very similar to oils and you can work from dark and overlay it with white, which is the reverse of watercolours."

Born in Winnipeg in 1948, Bracegirgdle grew up in Montréal, moved to Ottawa as a young man and then moved to Victoria a little over ten years ago. As a child he always drew and made pictures but the thought of becoming an artist never crossed his imagination.

He was first introduced to the potential of painting in 1967 when he was 19 and his best friend's mother invited him down to the basement to try out a new set of acrylic paints she had just purchased. Much to his surprise his best friend's mother's niece bought his painting for $50.

At that time, $50 was about what you could earn working for a week in a factory for minimum wage. The wheels clicked in the way they do when young and Bracegirdle thought he might be onto something. He had graduated from high school, didn't want to go to university and had been working at menial labour.

"Selling that first painting, realizing that there were options, was an epiphany. For that opportunity to come out of the blue was life changing so I started painting immediately and immediately started selling."

This doesn't mean that Bracegridle hit the big time right off the bat. "I didn't make much of a living at first. I spent my required years as a starving artist but I got encouragement. I started selling them in little local shows. The Bells Corners Clothes Line Art Fair, things like that."

As the majority of artists do, Bracegirdle worked his way through the world of style and influence. "The first painter that had a strong influence on me was Salvador Dali. A lot of the paintings in my first years were pretty weird and surrealistic. Then Vermeer influenced me because he was one of Dali's influences and then I discovered Jack Chambers."

Chambers was a Canadian artist from London, Ontario who died 1978 from leukemia. His work, however, was and remains highly influential. "He came on the market with this startling realism. I had never seen anything like it before. Because he was Canadian, I could see the originals and they were amazing. I immediately moved from surrealism to realism. I love being able to recognize things. The thrill for me is that it looks like reality."

He calls himself a painterly realist now because in contrast to his early work which sometimes verged on photo realism and was very tight, he has learned to loosen up over the years. "I've learned to let the paint do some talking. If you look now, there is next to no blending of the paint. I mix up a brush load, wipe on the canvas and move on. I want you to feel that you can reach right into the canvas because of the sense of depth. You can see all the paint."

In some ways, the way Bracegridle practices art has come full circle. When he started out he worked from photographs because he was unsure of his drawing skills. "After a number of years, I realized that drawing and painting from life is essential for the artist to be able to understand what he is actually looking at." Accordingly, he then worked from life for 18 years.

"I found it getting more and more difficult because subject matter has to sit still for you. That's one of the reasons I ended up doing so many interiors. I finally decided I knew how to draw well enough and went back to working from photographs and that was a great relief."

Bracegirdle now works the same hours that most of the world does because that's the way the world runs. He likes to be at his easel by seven or eight in the morning and works through to dinner time. Sometimes he will work late.

He uses a large palette. "I use a fairly extensive palette, about 12 colours and if I need a specialty red or something I have no qualms about pulling it in. Some artists use a restrictive palette to force the painting to have colour harmony but I find I have no problem having a sense of harmony in my paintings and I like to have access to all the colours even if I don't use them. I do like red. I just did a painting yesterday that has no red except for one little spot. I would almost have to say that orange is my favourite colour. I seem to get orange into almost every painting."

Bracegirdle starts working by priming his canvasses with white acrylic. Then using a yellow ochre he sketches in the outline, the shape and form of what he is going to paint and then he picks a spot to start and lays on the paint.

Although he also paints "normal" sized paintings Bracegirdle prefers to work small, producing paintings that are often less than one square foot.

"That has evolved over the last few years because I enjoy doing the small ones much more. I think it is because if you put together the subject matter and my brush work, the way the paint just comes off my brush in an intuitive way, and you put it together with the scale of the paintings it all works well together. I enjoy doing them more and they are more satisfying to do. I think they have more general appeal as well. It just seems to work better."

"I think my paintings speak for themselves. I hear other painters speak about their work and most of the time it sounds like intellectual gobbledygook.

I paint because I love to paint and I can. I've made pictures all my life and there is no other deep or philosophical reason for it. I remember being a little kid on the living room floor drawing pictures. I don't know why I did it then and I don't know why I do it now. How do you explain it?"