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Feeding an Art Crush on a Ghost: Cabell Brussel (1930–2013)
I recently found some watercolors by a relatively obscure painter, Cabell Brussel, to add to my collection of outsider art, folk art and “whatever art.”
I really love the way Cabell wanted you to realize form is just a dream we have. Because you have to do a lot of the work in constructing the landscape which you want to see in his watery clouds of pigment. There’s a “there” there, but it’s pretty ghostly.
I love his loose treatment, loose translation of subject matter. If you think of the somewhat loose treatment in the wilder watercolors by John Marin or even Whistler, and then go even further towards the abstraction of a painter like, say, Arthur Dove, you might end up in the Cabell Brussel hinterlands.
Brussel has works in the collections of The Met and The Brooklyn Museum.
The first two paintings below are in my collection. The others are photographs of works by Brussel I found online. The last painting is a portrait of the artist by Mimi Gross. One might surmise that Cabell and Mimi were friends and ran in the same artistic circles, but that’s speculation.
