Carl Bretzke | Master of Light

Carl Bretzke captures both night and day in his moody plein-air paintings

BY BONNIE GANGELHOFF

This story was featured in the November 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

CARL BRETZKE LOOKS out over a sandy beach filled with surfers and sun worshippers. He’s in the hills above Diver’s Cove watching the tide roll ashore in swaths of blue, aqua, and mauve. It’s an iconic, sunny scene in Southern California’s Laguna Beach, complete with towering palm trees and curving cliffs. A painting takes shape in Bretzke’s imagination—a panoramic seascape with an aerial perspective. He later created it, and the piece eventually hung on the wall at the opening of the prestigious Laguna Beach Plein Air Painting Invitational in 2017.

Scenes like that are just one of many subjects that Bretzke paints on location and from his studio in Minneapolis. It’s not always easy to define what inspires him, the artist says, but when it happens, he often feels a telltale sense of urgency to paint before the light changes. In fact, he is known as a master of portraying light; he credits his skills to the countless painting trips he’s taken, putting brush to canvas in every season and across varying terrain, from Sag Harbor, NY, to San Angelo, TX. “If you paint in a variety of places, it’s harder to paint predictable, comfortable paintings,” Bretzke says. “I am always challenged by unfamiliar scenes, such as when I, a Midwestern painter, am faced with oceans and mountains.”

Indeed, Bretzke is frequently on the move, spending about a week of every month traveling to plein-air events or workshops. California is one of his regular destinations. The rest of the time he’s painting close to home, even in the bone-chilling Minnesota winters. “Comparing light conditions in a Minnesota winter to a California summer is like comparing a box of gray pencils to a box of colored pencils,” he says. “Both can be beautiful, each in their own way.”

When we caught up with Bretzke recently, the artist had participated in an array of plein-air events and chalked up a number of recent awards. Earlier this year he won top honors for Best Body of Work at the Maui Plein Air Invitational, and he took home awards from both the Lighthouse Plein Air Festival in Florida and Door County Plein Air in Wisconsin. At the inaugural Eureka Springs Plein Air Invitational in Arkansas, Bretzke’s STUDY FOR THE LAST CUSTOMERS received kudos, too. The atmospheric scene depicts a small-town bar with the night’s final patrons silhouetted in the window. Outside, the street is deserted.

The moody nocturne evokes a sense of loneliness and mystery reminiscent of works by the Ashcan School painters. Laura Grenning, who represents Bretzke at Grenning Gallery in Sag Harbor, NY, describes the artist’s works as original and one of her best discoveries in the past few years. “Carl creates compositions that often have a narrative tension that feels particularly American in tone,” Grenning says. “Many people have said that there is a contemporary Hopper-like feeling in his street nocturnes. I also feel the influence of Grant Wood in some of his work.”

Today the demand for Bretzke’s night scenes is high. And that’s fine with the artist, because nocturnes are among his favorite genres to paint, even though it’s a challenge to capture neon signs, headlights, and streetlights with authenticity. The fact that the light conditions don’t change much means he can take his time; if he needs to spend five hours on location, as was the case with STUDY FOR THE LAST CUSTOMERS, it’s no problem.

The artist’s love of late-night painting began about five years ago, he says, when he saw a nocturne by Charles Rollo Peters [1862-1928] in Carmel, CA. (The California painter was so well-known for his night scenes that he earned the title Prince of Darkness.) The piece so impressed Bretzke that he vowed to paint at least one nocturne at every plein-air event he attended in the future.

THE GRAY DAYS that linger in Minnesota winters offer Bretzke the same unhurried approach and appeal as a nocturne, thanks to stable light conditions. On certain winter days in Minneapolis, for example, the entire landscape seems bathed in shades of gray, as Bretzke captures so per-fectly in TRACKS ON RIVER ICE. The chilly, monochromatic snow-scape depicts the Mississippi River with skyscrapers barely visible in the distance. “We were having a streak of cold, gray days in January, and I spotted this view while driving across a bridge over the Mississippi,” Bretzke says. “I was impressed by the serenity of the scene and was attracted to the smoke and steam against the gray silhouette of downtown Minneapolis.”

In describing the similarities between painting nocturnes and wintry scenes, Bretzke says, “In a nocturne, because there’s a dark ground plane, the upright shadows and the dark sky are close to the same color and value, so the painting will look very unified. I see a similar effect with winter scenes, particularly with a light-gray sky and light snow-covered ground plane. There’s lots of unity in a blizzard.”

Of course, there is one major difference: temperature. For TRACKS ON RIVER ICE, Bretzke recalls walking out on the bridge over the river that day in January. He shot reference photos for the piece because it was too cold and too late in the day to paint from life. But to create accurate color, he was compelled to return to the Mississippi a couple of days later. “It was still cloudy outside. Big surprise,” Bretzke says. “It was in the low 20s and slightly windy. I wasn’t very comfortable. I always overdress for winter painting, but my hands can get pretty cold, since I constantly take my right glove off for adding small brush strokes near the end of a painting.”

Bretzke admits it’s not always easy painting in the bitter cold. Even as a native Minnesotan, he has his limits—he rarely ventures outside if the temperature dips below 20 degrees. In the midst of the city’s winter grays, Bretzke sometimes adds a splash of color—a red traffic light on a downtown street, or a bright-blue trash bin in a neighborhood alleyway. But of all the man-made elements available to paint in a landscape, cars are his go-to visual stars. They pop up regularly in his work, in all seasons and all locations. Often the cars are vintage models, adding a sense of nostalgia and Americana. “I love looking at old cars. They are so much a part of our lives,” the artist says. “For me, sometimes a scene without a car doesn’t look real.”

BRETZKE WAS born and raised in Hutchinson, MN, a small town about 60 miles west of Minneapolis. As a child he was interested in art, in part, because an aunt who lived in Minneapolis took him and his cousins to art museums when they arrived in the “big city” for a visit. Bretzke did study art in high school, but when it came time for college, he chose to major in biology at the University of Colorado. He minored in art but admits that initially he didn’t have much of a career plan. “But after the first two years, I had taken so many of the required pre-med classes that it was natural to go that route,” he says.

That decision led him back home to attend medical school at the University of Minnesota, where he eventually settled on interventional radiology as a medical specialty. Interventional radiologists study X-rays, MRIs, and various scans carefully to guide them as they perform medical and surgical procedures that involve placing tubes and other devices through small incisions to help treat patients. After earning his medical degree, Bretzke practiced radiology for a number of years. During this time, art always sat on the back burner. But in 2002, his wife, Kristie, signed him up for a class with well-known Minnesota painter Joseph Paquet. “I studied with him for 12 years. He was my mentor and taught me how to paint and see as an artist,” Bretzke says.

In one sense, Bretzke’s day job in the medical world and his new leisure-time pursuit demanded similar skills—discerning subtle differences in values and shapes, and having good hand-eye coordination. Eventually, in 2016, Bretzke retired from his day job, left the X-rays behind, and entered the life of a full-time artist. Invitations to shows and interest from galleries were flowing his way.

As this story was going to press, Bretzke had just completed two paintings for the studio portion of the annual Laguna Beach Plein Air Painting Invitational in October. Three more completed works were bound for the Coors Western Art Exhibit & Sale in Denver in January. For the latter, Bretzke chose to capture the rural, mountainous terrain of Colorado. What caught his eye most was the tension of opposites in the landscape—shabby billboards or dilapidated structures set against stunning mountains and skies, as in MOVING HORSES and BREAKFAST MEETING.

Bretzke notes that, in some ways, not much has changed since his days as a physician. “Now, as an artist, I feel right at home standing and concentrating on my painting for three or four hours at a time, which is how long many of my medical procedures would take,” he says. “As an interventional radiologist, I was always watching a two-dimensional monitor and trying to think in three dimensions. Now I’m seeing a three-dimensional landscape and trying to think in two dimensions.” And the outcome, of course, is artwork we can all admire.

representation
Calloway Fine Art & Consulting, Washington, DC; Edward Montgomery Fine Art, Carmel, CA; Grenning Gallery, Sag Harbor, NY.

This story was featured in the November 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art November 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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