"The Art of Sal Brownfield"
by Brenda Sutton

In June of 2006, the city of Atlanta will be home to Myth and Imagination Month. With the Mythic Journeys Conference and Performance Festival as its anchor, the city will host events open to the public throughout the entire month.

The central art show will feature the work of Todd Murphy and Sal Brownfield, an amazing visual conversation from two powerful and different artists.

Here is a glimpse at some of the myth-inspired work of Sal Brownfield. Sal works in many mediums and often in large imagery. He's dwarfed by the double canvases of Blood of Eden shown below. The paintings were inspired by Peter Gabriel's song. Brownfield felt that the chorus of the song with it's repeated phrases about the blood of the woman and the man caught the ultimate connection of community:

In the blood of Eden
We've done everything we can
In the blood of Eden
Saw the end as we began
With the man in the woman
And the woman in the man
It was all for the union
Oh, the union of the woman,
The woman and the man.

The mythic creature Pegasus has become an icon for Sal; it flies through many of his works in different aspects. Pegasus celebrates feminine power, beauty rising from death, born from the blood of the abused and beheaded Gorgon Medusa. Where the hooves strike, pure springs of water arise. Sal sees the winged horse through Steiner's notion of a "barach" (sacred animal) — a depiction of the transforming place between man's interests and the consciousness of God.

Brownfield's Rabbit is sort of a clever character, sitting, and staring wide-eyed into your soul. The look on the creature's face challenges each of us to write our own myth, to live our own myth, to be the hero of our own mythology. This is no fluffy Easter Bunny. This is Rabbit from Native American lore, or the blurry pooka from bottom of Elwood P. Dowd's stein. He's wise and tricksy and ready to dart away into to other dimensions. If he tricks man or other animals, it's a tactic designed to flee trouble rather than to do harm.

You can read more about Sal at his website.

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