Art and Design

Note

Bruce Kurland began his career in his native New York, where training at the National Academy and Art Students League instilled an appreciation for early Dutch and French still life painting. After a few gallery exhibitions in the 1960s, Kurland left the city in pursuit of a quieter life in rural New York, eventually establishing a permanent studio in Buffalo. Inspired by his bucolic surroundings, Kurland developed his most recognizable and popular work - surrealist still lives of plants, animals, and everyday objects with allusions to mortality and time. In Field Daisies in Vase, one flower is careening toward decay while others, though still upright, have begun to lose petals and wilt. By employing bright, cheerful colors to capture oft-melancholic subject matter, Kurland’s paintings are at once haunting reminders of our own impermanence while remaining reverent to the natural world.