About Sean Breault

Latest News: Sean is the WINNER OF THE 2008 INNOVATIVE THEATER AWARD,NYC, BEST SET DESIGN

Sean' paintings are sometimes portraits, documentaries and landscapes and at other times a pure imaginative pursuit.  His work documents a place in time, a memory, an essence and hopefully a universal truth. Why we do what we do and what does that look like.

"I explore and challenge my imagination as I paint and construct, to see where my mind will take me. Making art is what makes me feel human, mortal and it's how I deal with day to day life. It's how I can connect with an outside world on an intimate level that feels safe to me.   I've made art for as long as I can remember, from making playful forts with boxes and bed sheets, to creating imaginative, fanciful worlds with toy cars and dolls, to disassembling anything I could get my hands on to see what made it tick.   Art in my world was never defined, not something that one aspired to do. No one ever called it art or called people artists. You just did things that made you feel better, to escape. A fight happens each time a pen goes to the paper or brush to a canvas.   Voices of regret push me forward and backwards.   They stop me in my tracks sometimes and then, in time, I move back in. The past was and sometimes still is, as for many people, full of shame and regret.   Of resentment, of mistakes made and self hatred. Of longing to be something that we're not.   To be more. To be free. My work allows me to have that freedom.   To deal with emotions and feelings on a physical, intimate level.   To wrap them up in a cocoon where they can be seen and not heard.   Kept under wraps like a collection of butterflies. Each one under glass with a single pin through its vitals. To be studied without fear of its flying away.   Art for me keeps me sane. It's always had that effect on me. A sense of something unconditional, of immortality, of love and success. Making art gives me that. I like ideas and I like making those ideas physical."

spb, 2008  

Article on Sean Breault by Eric Larsen , 2007

Sean Breault comes out of one of the oldest, and certainly one of the most rigorous, of artistic traditions—the one you might call the tradition of no tradition.

In the tradition of no tradition, the impulse to art—for any number of innate and inexplicable reasons—can break into existence within a person while at the same time he or she is born into such a place and time so as to be surrounded by few if any habits, customs, attitudes, or even physical surroundings of sorts that would naturally or conventionally guide or direct a person toward the making of art as a means of expressing reality.

In the tradition of no tradition, too, the artist is likely to be surrounded by little or nothing that would provide instruction naturally in the how of making art, or that would inspire art-making by means of the promise of reward—since praise is unlikely to come from a community where there’s not already a tradition of art-making or, for that matter, even a tradition of “appreciation” of art. For the real artist born into the tradition of no tradition, it’s less likely that praise will be forthcoming than that doubt, skepticism, or suspicion will. In a community, tradition, environment—even a nation, for that matter—where little is valued if its practical purpose for existing isn’t immediately evident—in such a situation the real artist will less likely be praised as be suspect, even to such a point that some will ask—behind the artist’s back—whether he or she is really quite all there.

And this is the story of art, then, in the tradition of no tradition. That the impulse to art survives at all in such a situation is the wonder, and, in the case of Sean Breault, is certainly has done so. The same story is told—in the literary arts—by Stephen Dedalus, who famously understood that in the tradition of no tradition (in his case, a powerful but inimicaltradition—which is not a different thing, but a variant) his means to achieving art could be gained only through “silence, exile, and cunning.”

Many artists have followed the Dedalus pattern, or variants of it, and so did Sean Breault. Instead of declaring much of anything about the real interests he harbored, he practiced a preternaturally unusual patience, said little, and observed relentlessly. The patience made him able to stay in school through college (where he took a practical, workaday major), postponing the art life; the saying little or nothing about himself allowed him to think as independently as he wished while meeting with—because he appeared outwardly to be conformity—a minimum of coercion, interference, or intrusion; and his unflagging observation of the people, activities, and undertakings around him—not to mention the numbers of jobs he held—gave him a range of practical skills rare in almost anyone, from carpentry and woodworking through masonry, electricity, welding, and all manner of building and construction skills.

He was by now in his early 20s, and it was at this time that he made his first—and possibly only—formal step toward seeing, learning about, and actually trying out his hand at real art, all this during his year or so at Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston. Before Massachusetts, he had made informal stabs at both photography and acting, and what he had learned from these, he took with him to Massachusetts. In a letter of April, 2007, he wrote:

"I borrowed my older sister’s camera and took my first “art” course, which was a huge step for me. My creative life before that was mostly hidden away and kept in the hobby category, thanks to what I pretty passionately felt was the real need for me to stay in disguise. Wanting to make a film was the catalyst for going first into photo—to learn composition of the frame—and that led to taking and acting class, to try to understand the ways of the actor, and that led to doing a few plays, all before I jumped into Mass Art. I had taken a few continuing education classes there prior to attending as a full time guy. While I was there, I was still studying drama as well at Northeastern University because I was still very much interested in the process of the actor, the descent into character, and the different levels of understanding motive, if that makes any sense—why people say what they say, move the way they move, talk the way they talk. Why a person writes or paints or dances or takes photos. Finding reasons like these, for me, was fascinating and satisfying, because it finally was addressing the deep need and desire for a creative life that I was sure I’d always desired—and kept completely disguised and locked up. Actually calling myself an artist, at Mass Art, was the first time that I could walk with my head high and chest up. I did feel like I had found my place."

All these influences and forces—the desire, the need for secretiveness, the disguised self, and even the building crafts and manual dexterity—came together in Breault’s painting and remain there still. These paintings and artworks—mixed media, for example—are never not mysterious. Whether they’re deep psychologically is more difficult to say, but that they’re powerful psychologically, and that their power expresses itself through the works while hiding within and behind the works at the very same time—no viewer can stay long unaware of these truths, especially so in the less geometrically organized pieces.

It’s as though there are at least two vocabularies for Breault, highly divergent in manner although seemingly not so in expressive purpose or “hiddenness” of expression. From 1995, for example, the jauntily comic and brightly colored “Three Cups ” is full of challenge for the viewer to look for stuff in here, as it were. And who wouldn’t want to look, though knowing that looking is the fun, while the finding will never be certain. In that way, asking for resolution and resisting it to the death, the piece gets—and keeps—its life, even including the craftsman’s touch of leaving that vertical space down the center, drawing a viewer in by lighting the desire just to put a hand on each side of the frame—and push the thing together, a thing that’s never going to happen any more than Keats’ pursuing swain will ever reach his fair and fleeing beloved in “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

Many of the same traits are present in the “City Scape ” of seven years later, this 2002 piece with colors somewhat more muted, the implication of image reflected in water having been added, there being a slightly greater severity of line, the whole with none of the curving lines of before, but now lines that cut, taper, sometimes disappear—so that the mood overall is different, while at the same time the way the painting works, and what it’s asking for (and denying) remain very much akin to those aspects of its sibling of 1995.

But then: ready yourself for the other Breault vocabulary, which isn’t by any means a matter simply of chronologic change—as you can see by a single first look at a piece from 2000, right in between the earlier two. And here it is, a third “Oil on Canvas, Waiting ” that’s seemingly an image as far removed from the other two as it could be.

But it isn’t really an entirely different phenomenon, even though, clearly, it is vastly different in numerous ways. The tone overall, is different, as is the new sooty darkness for background (and gathered at bottom center of the piece), and then there’s the presence itself of an objective image of some kind, this time a figure, and a new use of high contrast in color—the blue, black, and red near the figure’s apparent hairline, forehead, and eyes. These colors can be compared to the colors in the previous two pieces we looked at—notice the familiar pastels, for example, in the chest and hands, and the same familiar use of straight, brushed lines in the arms.

And yet the entire world of this painting, unlike the earlier two, the vocabulary of it, the psycho/emotional intensity of it (the suggestion of a matted bloody wound, for example) actually shocks the viewer. It’s as though—and here’s one of the central elements of continuity between this painting and the two others—the piece, as we saw before, is offering something and simultaneously denying it. “What am I?”, the earlier paintings asked, at the same time refusing to answer. That’s true here, too, but the question is intensified enormously by the very nature of the image. “What am I?”, it asks, and, once more, doesn’t—and never will—tell. In this case, too, there’s a new dramatic, or a new dramatic-aesthetic, element that’s a part of the paradox: the paradox that the question won’t stop being asked, and the answer that won’t stop being hidden.

And that element comes into being because of this painting’s refusal even in the most remote or slightest imaginable way to concern itself with being either charming or pretty. It’s a fierce image, a courageous image, in its unstinting willingness to put that wound-like red mass on the head of what must be—look at that thin neck, narrow chest—a young boy. Ferocity of this degree in combination with innocence of that degree is, in a word, shocking. And so this painting, in its paradoxic self, has the added tension of not just asking “What am I?” but also at one and the same time demanding, “Look at me,” while simultaneously daring the viewer, in effect asking, “Do you dare look at me?” And there will be some, indeed, who may not dare, or won’t dare for long, because it does take courage to do it—as the painting (about the painter, we can’t say) well knows.

Earlier on, I said that “it’s as though there are at least two vocabularies for Breault,” and this may be the moment to go back to that phrase “at least” and suggest a third vocabulary, or at least a variant on the one we’ve just been looking at, the one that’s admittedly shocking. Maybe the word should be “emergent,” since if a person looks at this “Oil on Canvas, 357W45” from 2001, nothing like the grotesquely matted red-with-black is to be found, but instead a group of much less brightly colored “emergent” faces, quite ghostly, come toward the viewer. Even then, however, look closely in this relative quietness, not only at the eyes of the central top figure—one eye is near-perfectly circular and empty, the other, again red, is little other than a violent bruise—but also at the “detail” chosen for us by the painter: and there you are, the admittedly shocking element comes back again returns, as if it’s been hidden within the more monochrome subtleties of the larger canvas. And do look at that detail, as it dares you to even as it may repel: there are faces within this face, even what may be a mouth with teeth, itself placed just to the left of what may be another eye, these both slightly above what may be a nose, and below that “nose” a navel-like suggestion, and below it yet another mouth—perhaps—in the almost incredible complexity of the entire detail—this astonishing face-belly-mouth-womb assemblage of imagery.

With so extraordinarily crafted a talent as Breault’s, and with such apparently abundant depths of psycho-emotional content or subject matter available to feed and supply this craft, it’s not surprising that, at their best, these are pieces of art unlike any others a person will see. It’s as though their subject matter comes from a kind of aquifer, a reservoir of feeling, experience, memory, pain—entirely hidden, unseen, its very existence both unknown and unknowable except, from time to time, as it surfaces or emerges in the form of and through the complex and paradoxic paintings that Breault achieves.

Some pieces may at first glance simple exercises in craft, like this “Portrait of Kathy, Oil on Canvas” from 2003, a return to the geometry and color of pieces like those we looked at in Breault’s “first” vocabulary. But by now, a closer look shows that there’s almost always a blending of the “vocabularies,” so that even when Breault may be “thinking” primarily in the geometric-and-multi-color “vocabulary,” echoes of the matted, red-black wound of “waiting” can be seen, as in this detail, for example, in the lower left-hand rectangular image.“cage” dated here 2004 but still “in progress” (but do take a quick look at this) shows a more overt blend of the colorful-geometric with the psycho-intensity of the “second” vocabulary. A person is almost tempted to name the two vocabularies of Breault as his “comic” and “tragic” visual vocabularies, with the potential always there for a blend into the “tragic-comic”—something along the lines of one of my own most-loved personal favorites, “Oil on Canvas, Man on Bench,” from 2006.

When the two sides of the artist are working together at peak effect, humor can come into existence right in the midst of great darkness, pain, or even fear-memory. In “Oil on Canvas 7,” the pot-bellied man is almost a harmless hobo cum Santa Claus at first glance, the long drippings from his fingers suggesting his tiredness, or maybe the unfinished (or never-to-be-finished) tasks that anyone knows well, perhaps especially as they flop down on a park bench, tired out from the efforts.

Good enough—and yet then again, looking more closely one notices the torch-blackened upper right torso, then the most curiously undarkened part of the left torso, with its clearly female-like left breast. Only belatedly—at least belatedly in my case—does the bishop’s miter come to one’s attention, and then elements of the entire painting reassert themselves with potential new “meanings,” from the dramatic finger-drippings themselves, to the crudely-imaged genitals, the large mouse-hole reminiscent of a church door that’s cut into the bench, the female breast, even the could-be-pregnant pot belly.

Humor, bitterness, richness, variety, curious and almost hallucinatory “psychology”—like the “psychology” of those big, darkness-gathering, ham-hands with their now-grotesque though nevertheless still amusing drippings—of substances we have no desire to know the exact identity of, while at the same time (paradox again at work) we want to know precisely and definitively what they are.

And yet, in the way of much of the world’s greatest art, we never will. After all, this is exactly what keeps much, maybe even all, great art perdurable—that it ever asks and never tells. In literature, that’s the principle so largely at work from Chaucer (what does the garrulous Wife of Bath not talk about?) through Shakespeare (“Had I but time, . . . oh, I could tell you,” says Hamlet, not telling) and on to Faulkner and Samuel Beckett (according to Vivien Mercer, Godot was a play in which “nothing happens, twice”), and, of course, the Mona Lisa will never tell us the cause of that famous smile.

Breault has that same kind of deep, foundational, dramatic understanding in his own visual work. And, by making use of understanding whether consciously or not, and by trusting it, he forges pieces of work that wrestle with angels and keep their secrets even as they drawn us toward them and beg us to ask for them again and again.

Speaking of angels, let’s close with this image, which I’ll call the pink one with the halo in it (“Oil on Canvas, Mass Card ”). And what shall we say about it? Well, isn’t more a matter of what we’ll ask?. After all, who is that figure under the halo? And that miniature couple standing, of all things, on her (on its?) hand? (And that other little figure, dark, wearing—a coolie’s hat?) And the halo-figure’s arms—why segmented? why veined? and why veined with those thin, dark, single-stranded tendrils?

And so on. And so on. Nothing is going to happen, and it’s going to happen again and again and again, for every bit as long as we stand here asking, and asking, and asking. And not only the painting, but also the artist, the one who has made this nothing happen—neither is he going to tell us a single thing further. He knows he doesn’t need to, and that maybe he can’t, and he knows, beyond that, that even if he could it would be a very bad idea if he did—because then—that’s right—because then we might stop asking.

But he does do something more for us, even so. As a detail that we can look at very closely, he chooses—for us—this one. So look at it, look at it, look at it as long and hard as you can—and then go ahead and ask.