Some 62 years ago Daniel Brush, a 13-year-old from Cleveland, stood at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London with a formative experience.
His mother had taken him there as part of a European tour intended, as he later said, to open his eyes. The visit to the Victoria and Albert certainly had that effect, especially the jewelry rooms and a particular ancient gold Etruscan bowl decorated with an esoteric technique called granulation.
“I didn’t know what granulation was then,” said Mr. Brush told DailyExpertNews in 2012, “But I saw a gold bowl with lots of little balls on it. I thought, ‘I have to make something like this in my life.’”
If that was some sort of fate, Mr. Brush had fulfilled it by the time of that interview and then some. He had become an artist known – initially to a small group of connoisseurs, but gradually to a wider circle – for his unique works defined by their detail and the dedication that went into them. His jewelry was often not so much meant to be worn as to be cherished. His small sculptures drew comparisons to Fabergé eggs because of their delicacy and their small-scale artistry. He made works inspired by rituals of the Tendai Buddhist monks of Japan and works inspired by watching his son dip animal crackers in milk.
“He certainly crosses boundaries more than anyone I can think of,” said Holly Hotchner, then director of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, in 2012, when that museum put on “Daniel Brush: Blue Steel Gold Light,” the first broad survey of his work.
Mr. Brush died in Manhattan on November 26. He turned 75.
His wife, Olivia Brush, confirmed the death. No reason was given.
Mr. Brush was a closely guarded secret in the art world for many years, disapproving of the gallery scene, commissions, and dealer representation. Collectors who heard of his work could stop by the loft in Manhattan’s Flatiron neighborhood where he and his wife, also an artist, lived and worked, but “it’s often ‘not for sale’ because he needs a personal connection and the sense that buyers will be sensitive caretakers of his art,” wrote The Times in 2012.
A 1998 exhibition at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, “Daniel Brush: Gold Without Boundaries,” brought him new visibility. But even after that, articles about him often described him as “recluse,” “elusive,” “enigmatic,” and “reclusive.”
He had a morning ritual in which he spent hours sweeping the attic, “just as a Buddhist monk would sweep the temple floor during meditation,” The Times wrote in 2020. The attic contained antique scissors, an 18th-century lathe and various other vintage items. and machines, proof of Mr. Brush’s self-taught mastery of techniques such as the aforementioned granulation—visitors who took a magnifying glass to some of his jewelry and other pieces saw that they were decorated with strands of grainy bits of gold.
“What struck me about his work is his demanding nature and his ability to machine gold, aluminum and steel with absolute precision,” wrote Nicolas Bos, CEO of the French jewelery company Van Cleef & Arpels, in the foreword to the 2019 book. .”Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture.” “He claims to be a goldsmith, a jeweler and a metalworker, but I think there is some kind of magician in him before all.”
Daniel David Brush was born on January 22, 1947 in Cleveland. His parents, Arthur and Clara (Gross) Brush, owned a children’s clothing store.
He started taking art classes as a child. “I could draw the armor in the Cleveland Museum of Art quite well,” he told The Times in 2012.
After the inspiring journey to Europe when he was 13, he received a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from what is now Carnegie Mellon University in 1969 and a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Southern California in 1971. he met a fellow student, Lynn Alpert; they married in 1969 and she began using the name Olivia Brush.
In the 1970s, after graduating from college, Mr. Brush taught at Georgetown University and his paintings began to attract some attention; some were included in a group show at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery in 1976. But he was uncomfortable teaching.
“The school’s job was to fit their bright students into the job market,” he said in a 2021 interview with Melanie Grant, a prominent jewelry writer. “Parents wanted to pay for an education that offered work and upward mobility.”
“I felt my job should be to encourage endless spirals of confusion to get students to think critically, to encourage questioning, to look at a situation not just from left field, but to create a whole new point of view for the situation,” he added.
So he and his wife moved to New York, and he began to focus intensely on his art — though he acknowledged in a 2017 interview with Women’s Wear Daily that his fan base was limited.
“I’m available, and people can come and they can watch, and every now and then they come,” he said. “So what’s happened in the last 30 years is I became immensely famous in front of 10 people, and five died.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Brush is survived by their son, Silla.
Mrs Brush said that for her husband ‘life and work were synonymous’.
“There was no beginning or end to the day,” she said in an email. “If he thought about something in the middle of the night, he would get up and go back to work. Our studio, in which we both lived and worked, is undivided. Our son grew up in an environment where machines, cloths and piles of metal were right in front of his bedroom.”
If his work couldn’t be pigeonholed, she said, that was his own choice.
“He always rejected art categories and loved going back and forth between painting, drawing, sculpture and jewelry — going wherever his mind went,” she said. “The work he made was meaningful. They were all ways to learn. The work and act of making it possessed him on a deep emotional level that people often said they could feel or see.
That was his hope.
“If you can hold someone back just a little bit, if my work can somehow mirror their own feelings, they start looking at other art and the whole experience becomes something beautiful,” he said in 1998. ” If they can look at my work and hear my heart pounding, they really hear their heart pounding.”
