V I S U A L
A R T S
Weight of Empathy
THE PAINTINGS OF BRENT HUDSPETH T E X T
BY
S H A N E
B
rent Hudspeth is first and foremost an artist. Second, he is a native of Porterville. Like so many people who can call themselves natives, his grandparents and mom migrated from Oklahoma to the fertile soils of the Central Valley during the Dust Bowl era, in search of work and a means to survive. Back in those days, the horse was an important part of life and hard work was the one thing that ensured a chance of putting food on the table. This backdrop is one that I am very familiar with having grown up in Lindsay and Strathmore, and it is one of the many reasons I gravitated towards Brent when we met at Porterville College back in 1981. We chose art as our major and, at that time, the college had one art teacher, making it impossible not to end up in the same classes. From day one, I recognized his drawing skills and saw him as someone to watch. 18 L I F E S T Y L E | F E B R UA R Y 2 0 2 0
G U F F O G G
I graduated from Porterville College in 1983 and transferred to CalArts in Valencia. I recall Brent paying me a visit to see if CalArts — which redefined what a liberal art school was supposed to look like — was a place for him to continue his studies. Brent decided right then that CalArts was not a fit for him and set his sights on the other art school, Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. The school is widely known for graphic and transportation design (as in the look of cars), but instead Brent pursued the illustration and painting programs. Brent graduated in 1989, staying in L.A. and working as an illustrator for some big companies for more than 20 years, saying, “I must add that at no time during this period of doing digital work for a living did I neglect my study of and interest in the process of painting with oils. I was continually painting and working in oils
from the time I was at Art Center. When I was at Imagic in Hollywood, I showed a fellow digital artist some of my paintings and she said, ‘What are you doing here?’ Sometime in 1998, I became reacquainted with an instructor I had at Art Center, fine artist Harry Carmean. Harry is still a mentor, and he has shared so much with me about painting and the different ways of composing a painting. “In 2004, I had noticed my folks were struggling more and more, and my grandparents were living by themselves out on Teapot Dome Avenue, where they had originally settled. In 2005, I decided to come back to Porterville to help my family. Both of my parents passed away within a year, followed by the loss of my grandparents.” Brent took over his grandparents’ ranch, coming full circle from where he started. And then, Facebook brought us back in touch and I began following Brent's work that he was posting, marveling at his paintings of horses. Now that we have a little background on Brent, I want to talk about art. Art begins as an idea. I want to emphasize the word idea because it is formed by who we are, and how we see and think about our world. Each of us has memories and, as one day becomes the next, these memories get layered and compressed, similar I think
