Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 9, 1995 TAG: 9504100008
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV19 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: ADRIANNE BEE SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
``Somehow that quiet little scene stays with me,'' the now adult Charles Brouwer says as he stands in his front yard before his sculpture of a man carrying a ladder. Brouwer, a sculptor and professor of art at Radford University, finds his work is rooted in such real experiences.
``All of my heroes have been ladder carriers,'' Brouwer says as he explains what ladders have come to mean for him in his artwork. ``There's that literal person
who's a ladder carrier and then there are metaphorical ladder carriers like Mother Teresa ... anyone who is involved with trying to lift people up and transcend their everyday experience.''
Art itself is a ladder in Brouwer's eyes, offering a way to clamber up out of the banality of the camera-eye world to see things in a different way.
If you spend some time walking with Brouwer among the wooden sculptures in his yard, you will see things in a new way. Stand next to his sculpture of a picnic table. It is a very Alice-in-Wonderland experience.
``It has that fun-house sort of appeal. When you're at the end where it's big you feel small, and at the small end you feel big,'' Brouwer says with a smile. ``It's a way to explore [the fact] that linear perspective is a convention we just accept.''
Brouwer explains his inspiration for the skewed picnic table. "We look at the road getting narrower in the distance even though we know it doesn't. Trying to build
the table as if it were drawn in linear perspective - building it in three dimensions - points that out.''
Not too far from the picnic table you'll find an angel pushing a lawnmower. ``A lot of the work that I do in art has to do with capturing ordinary moments,'' Brouwer says, describing a series of his paintings and sculptures about mowing the lawn.
His inspiration for the wooden lawn-mowing angel came from a passage in the Bible. ``The harvest is the close of the age, and the reapers are angels,'' Matthew 13:39. To Brouwer, mowing the lawn is a modern-day type of harvesting. His neighbors, meanwhile, eye his harvesting angel and humorously wish for one to mow their own yards.
Some angels can't be seen. These are the angels that inspire Brouwer. ``Angels point you in the way you will end up going. They tell you things now which you will not hear until later,'' Brouwer says.
Childhood is one of those angels that whispers behind Brouwer's sculptures. In his garage he has rebuilt what he calls ``one of those good childhood memories.'' Wooden steps ascend to a porch with a piano that has a church steeple on top. This sculpture comes from Sunday mornings when young Charles would go to church with his parents.
When the children returned home after Sunday School, "I can remember coming up to the porch. Lunch would be ready, and [my mother] would be playing the piano,'' Brouwer recalls.
The steps of his childhood home recall a favorite place where he played and felt safe. ``If someone was chasing you to beat the living daylight out of you, if you could make it to the porch, you were safe,'' Brouwer says with a quiet laugh.
Reconstructing memories is Brouwer's goal, not reliving the past. ``I think that everyone's childhood has a potential for meaning whether their past experience was really horrible or wonderful.''
Brouwer didn't always think that way. As a young college student studying English and philosophy, he remembers thinking he needed some big tragedy in his life to have something to write about.
After graduating from Grand Valley State University in Michigan, a couple of art classes led him to pursue a graduate degree in art at Portland State in Oregon. Brouwer then taught high school art in Australia and Michigan, finished his graduate work and then ended up at Radford teaching sculpture and art education. ``When I was exposed to art there was something I could connect up with.'' Brouwer thinks this was largely because he could use manual skills he had learned as a boy from a father with a wood shop and a handy grandfather
Brouwer's wife has received a gift that stands in the couple's front yard. The wooden sculpture of two ladders holding hands is called "Transcending Together. ``
``Some people see it and think it's a broken ladder, which is an interesting reversal of what it is,'' Brouwer says. But people's differing interpretations also satisfy Brouwer. He prefers for viewers to draw their own meanings from his art.
Brouwer will tell you what he was thinking when he created his sculptures but he doesn't want to completely explain his art. He wants viewers to find their own meaning, to see his sculpture as a metaphor and make the connection between life and art.
Brouwer's art is down to earth without the obscurity found in a lot of modern art. His sculptures lean more toward the folk art tradition, yet offer an ascension, a chance to take a moment to step up out of everyday life and see things a bit differently.
There is a sculpture in the corner of Brouwer's backyard - a ladder with wings. You get the feeling it could take flight.
Brouwer's sculptures and what they offer to the viewer qualify him, just as much as his heros, as a ladder carrier.
by CNB