EaRTh staff conducted an interview with Stephen Bruce, a copper artist based in the San Francisco East Bay, California, United States.

EaRTh: We’re here with Stephene Bruce, in his studio in Richmond, California. Could you tell us a little bit about the connection between the kind of art you do and the earth? What inspires you? How is your art connected to our ecologies?

Stephen Bruce: Well, probably the most important part for me is that I think that every artist is knocking off Mother Nature, and the question is how do we do that? How do we capture her beauty? And so, for me, just mimicking some of the highlights that she gives us in a day…. Often, we don't even pay attention. I love a sunset. I love a sunrise, or just a horizon. 

And copper is such an interesting metal because it is one of the few metals that we can actually mine from the earth. The fact that it gives me these earthy representations… in my practice… even just the textures sometimes look somewhat geological. And I think there's a reason for that; that's the connection for me. I often get teased about being a sucker for a sunrise. I will actually jump off a freeway to get a picture of a sunset. Being able to capture that moment, that second, in my work in a still piece, in such an industrial medium, is always a fascinating experience for me. 

EaRTh: Why do you call it an industrial medium?

Stephen Bruce: If you walk into my studio, there's… I'm using copper; it comes in these big giant sheets. I have a machine for cutting sheet metal. There, I can break down a 10-foot piece of sheet metal. I often am challenged when I apply for art exhibits. Do I apply as a metal artist? Or do I apply as a mixed media artist? It's important that the subject, that the material I'm working with is copper.

Original artwork by Stephen Bruce 2: treated copper sheet with copper wire.

But when you walk up [to one of my pieces], I don't necessarily want you to think right away, oh, he's working on copper. It's an interesting progression — or maturation — in my work, because when I first started, I did pieces like this [pointing to copper wire incorporated into his artwork] where I thought it was important to include some really clear elements of copper. I usually joke that everybody knows somebody who was stealing copper wire out of some building and got electrocuted.

Original artwork by Stephen Bruce 3: treated copper sheet with copper wire.

And so, people see this [pointing to the copper wire], and this kind of tells them, okay, this is metal. Those are the kinds of pieces I used to do in the beginning. I’ve been doing these again, as a remembrance of what I used to do. I kind of got reacquainted with these and decided to do some pieces like this.

But for the most part, nowadays, I want you to see, I want you to see something visual that stimulates you to think of… where did I see this. And it might be that maybe you're in Sedona [California]. Maybe you were here in the Bay Area during the pandemic, and it was that September night, when the sun never came out, it was just orangey all day. And it looks like, you know, look like a sunset almost on the Serengeti, where it was just darkness and orange sky. Maybe you feel like you're in Southwest Florida, and you're on a white sand beach. I'm basically trying to capture those feelings. So when you see that, I hope that's what it brings back to people.

Original artwork by Stephen Bruce 4: treated copper sheet.

EaRTh: When you create your artwork, and when you look at it later, it evokes nature for you? 

Stephen Bruce: Oh, absolutely. 

EaRTh: And emotions that you had while you were in nature? 

Stephen Bruce: Yeah. So typically… one of my practices… some artists do sketches. But I have this quirky sketch book, where I'm driving across country, and I see something, I have a sketch pad that's in between me and the passenger seat. And I usually have a pen and pencil right next to it. And sometimes I'll actually have a little — if I'm prepared — I'll have little boxes, because each box is a painting. And as I see… as I see a landscape, I will write in the top portion… I might write pickle juice. But I won't write out pickle juice, I'll write P-I-C; that tells me it's pickle juice. Because pickle juice represents a color for me. And I might be looking to get a dark brown tone, a chocolate brown. In that case, I'd write the code down for that chemical. So when I go back and look at my sketchbook, I can look at that little sketch with those chemical references and know what I was looking at in that particular time. And it could be three or four days later. 

EaRTh: So that's interesting, you have a chemistry shorthand for how you want to portray what you just saw.

Stephen Bruce: Yeah.

Original artwork by Stephen Bruce 5: treated copper sheet.

EaRTh: Tell us what these spirals over here evoke in nature.

Stephen Bruce: Well, I like to think that you're looking at a body of water from above. So, you're flying over some estuary, but there's trails of cooler blues. In this particular case, I was really trying to make sure that I left a lot of the copper to come through. So its’ almost as though you can see the ground in some of these wet spaces. And so I'm manipulating two different chemicals, and the timing of them, to get all these different reactions going. And I usually, I frequently work in sets of three, because the first time you do it, you go, ooh, okay… if I can tweak this a little more. So I do another one [another spiral piece]. And then by the time I get to the third, I'm probably where I wanted it to be. Or there might be a four, five, and six [laughing]. 

So this is something that I did on a larger piece. They had this in the Richmond Art Center. And I liked it. I liked the process, and I wanted to play with it some more. And so these are 24 by 24. And then they're just about done to the next stage where they get… they'll get coating. It keeps them from becoming, you know, oxidized.

EaRTh: Thanks so much for this brief introduction to your art, Stephen.