#jonathan bray

[whatsnextmovies]

The Babysitter

[ossurworld]

Coffee Date: Tea for Two

Coffee Date: Tea for Two

DATELINE: Two Lumps?

  Check Please.

You have here a comedy of manners about the hellish life of a man whom everyone presumes is gay. This includes his mother and brother, and sundry supporting characters in the tale entitled Coffee Date.

You have here the classic misunderstanding and crossed identity.

Jonathan Bray certainly is an actor one might presume is gay. We know that his costar, Wilson…

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[toutpetitlaplanete]

Jonathan Bray - Untitled, 2013

[huariqueje]

Night on Plaza Real, Barcelona   -  .  Jonathan Bray , 2014

American b.1969-

Watercolour on paper

[toutpetitlaplanete]

  In this second half of our first interview for "Escape From New York," we revisit Jonathan Bray in his Jakarta studio.  For the first part of the interview, click here.  Also, if you're an artist with a unique studio space outside NYC and would like to be interviewed, feel free to message me!

How does your isolated studio space affect your work?

The only way the place affects my work is by a lack of traditional art supplies, or I guess they have them here but they’re so marked up I couldn’t afford them and make the works I want to make at the scale I want to make it. So the whole "making do" has dramatically effected my work: I have come up with tons of styles and techniques I never would have used. For example, I just invented my own fine tip markers using discarded waterbottles that I find in the streets of Jakarta along with these tubes you would use to feed a baby kitten.  They work great, way faster than stenciling. I also use these automotive paints, which I just read online cause all sorts of cancers, but they’re cheap, so I feel free to push myself because I’m not worried about the price, and the colors are strong—I can make any color I want really, and the results I get with them are so unexpected and exciting that I figure its worth it the long term damage to my health in exchange for short term satisfaction with the work.

Since your studio in Indonesia is so removed, are there any dangers of getting too lost in your artwork. Are there any examples of you actually being glad to return to USA or Los Angeles?

I’m not concerned about being lost in my work, in fact that's exactly what I’m setting out to do. Being apart from the ‘art world,’ it's all so refreshing to be away from all that, for it just to be about me having fun and seeing what I can come up with. I’m happy to come back here, to “third world it" as I put it, making art that pleases me.

Who are some artists that you are really into right now?

If I had to list the artists I’m into I would have to go into my folder of "inspiring art" which I see currently has 1,842 jpegs, and the list would be in the hundreds. For two years pretty much--as a form of procrastination, but also figuring out what turns me on and discovering my own taste--I just browsed the internet, collecting artists' work as jpegs, getting confidence and inspiration for my own vision through their stuff. But if I had to mention one that I sometimes spend more than 5 minutes at a time looking at, it’d be Arden Bendler Browning’s paintings.

[toutpetitlaplanete]

Jonathan Bray - Untitled, 2013

I am pleased to present a new exclusive Tout Petit series called "Escape From New York."  Over the years, the art world has begun to realize that their epicenter has shifted dramatically.  Art fairs in Europe, Asia and Latin America are beginning to change the way galleries and museums do business. Meanwhile, many artists in New York struggle with high rents, lack of space, and insane competition. I have been in contact with some artists who have studios outside the art world hub of New York City, and lately I have been interested in how these artists both struggle and thrive in their own, unique ways.

For our first artist, we visit Jonathan Bray, a Californian who moved to Indonesia a few years ago where he could easily afford studio space and an assistant (just to give you an idea, a year's worth of rent there would pay for about one month in Bushwick).  Bray's style ranges widely between abstract, primitivist, sculptural and he often experiments with digital media.  Here is the first part of my interview with Bray about his studio in Jakarta.

  Why did you choose Jakarta as a location for your studio?

I chose to move to Jakarta after working in Borneo for two and a half years. I still have trouble explaining to people why I moved to this city.  In most people's eyes it's one of the most loathsome cities in the world—to be honest there is very little to like about it. I think what attracted me to it was the fact that it's the capital of Indonesia, it's got millions of people, but it's all business, or—what could you call it?—it's all dog eat dog: weaving in and out of traffic, hustling.  It's a city of hustlers, and I really wanted to see art have a place in it.  

Art to Jakarta feels as necessary as fine art is to a dog--not that people here are dogs or can’t appreciate art, that’s probably a shitty example--but it just feels completely irrelevant sometimes.  People are confused when I tell them I paint all day in my studio.  I guess I figured if my art is gripping enough, if I could somehow force a reaction through my art, then pow, something really cool could happen, like I could wake up a whole city to its creative potential, as grandiose and idealistic as that sounds.

What exactly do you have in mind to accomplish this?

I started making these massive papier mâché masks, and my plan is to just put them in the middle of a busy intersection.  I’d actually like people to weave around them in traffic, and be like ‘wtf is this?’ and watch it get destroyed by all the millions of bumble bee motorbikes. That's the kind of pow I was talking about, like throwing it in their faces, hustler style, the way they throw whatever they’re selling in my face.

Tell me more about what your studio is like.

Within Jakarta I’m in this kind of funny place.  It's like this village within the city, like a maze of back alleyways, and it's all one big extended family... plus me, the white guy. As if being the only foreigner here isn't already weird enough for them, they see me in the house all day, covered in paint, playing loud electronica, encased in a cloud of poisonous paint fumes.  Sometimes I go the whole day wearing nothing but a gas mask and a pair of boxers, and I feel as out of place as if I was transported to the same place 100 years ago, like there’s nothing weirder about me now and what it would have been like back then.

It's also pretty darn conservative, I was just warned just the other day if I bring another lady to the house there’s a good possibility the village will form a mob and could either force me to marry on the spot, or strip me naked and burn me alive. I guess that's pretty unique too.

[toutpetitlaplanete]

Jonathan Bray - Untitled, 2012