Richard Brubaker
Richard Brubaker took up metal work as a retirement hobby. He studied chemistry at Davidson College and medicine at Harvard. While in medical school, he acquired metal-working skills as a part-time machinist, making parts for custom-made stereoscopic cameras in the Howe Laboratory in Boston's Eye and Ear Infirmary. Later as an ophthalmologist and visual scientist at the Mayo Clinic, he continued learning metal work in the fabrication of research instruments for his laboratory. After retirement, he set up an art studio on a farm near Rochester, Minnesota. Over the last ten years, he has fabricated over 100 pieces of metal art of steel and aluminum, many of which were inspired from sketches and paintings by his artist daughter, Heather Brubaker of San Francisco.
Artist Philosophy
My creative work begins with metal that has been discarded from industry and has sometimes lain for years in outdoor junk heaps. This material is reincarnated by a process of plasma cutting, machining, grinding, welding, and patination that creates new structures having few if any vestiges of its former existence. Each abstract sculpture is intended to convey metaphorical images that are unique to each observer, but images that share common threads drawn from biological processes- evolution, metamorphosis, symbiosis, replication, survival, homeostasis. Rather than creating compositions of "found objects," I attempt to mask the previous form of the metal in order to elminate any ambivalence in the finished piece. Without a formal training in art, I find inspiration in the works of others, especially of my daughter's oil paintings and sketches. In some cases, pieces I make have been designed and directed completely by her. However, the most nearly unique works have evolved in the shop while individual pieces of steel or aluminum are fitted, refitted, moved, tested, discarded or welded in place. Often it is the arrangement of individual parts rather than their shapes that conveys the intended message.