Todd Brugman

Todd Brugman is from Boston's north shore. He has been creating and thinking about the visual arts since he was a child. His interests and abilities were noticed and applauded by his parents and teachers as early as preschool. Todd has always been a dreamer. He lived, and often still lives in his head, as a child he came across as shy, yet was never an introvert. He's a deep existential thinker, who’s thoughts go further than his head and are expressed in every word he says and object he creates.

Todd lives with his wife, Rachel, and beagle, Maxine, and paints full time, daily at his Boston studio.

Todd focuses full-time on his art. He states that he must paint, “... despite difficulties that have been present throughout my life and upbringing, I am a survivor, creating art allows me to be a survivor... I focus on happiness and contentment; for me they are synonymous… art is not simply a vocation, art is a way of being, a way of thinking, a way of loving, and a way of living”
For Todd, life is “painful,” for Todd life is “wonderfully beautiful,” he says these aren’t mutually exclusive for him. He paints daily and he states that no matter where his mind is, even if it is in a dark place seconds before the brush hits the canvas, as soon as it does, he is transported into his work and functions as one would while lucid dreaming.

Todd describes it as a world of the most illuminating ideas that are fleeting like a dream, delicious smelling colors of a nuance of emotion, ideas that are half answers without a question. This is a place of true joy and contentment. For Todd, painting is the reason.

"I find the allowing emotions to exist and speak, is what makes art human. What is uniquely human is always beautiful.
My work studies the human emotional construct via visual embodiment, as I don't illustrate in my work, my work is this concept incarnate.
I find truth is nature and locate contours essential to how it emotes. I edit out any extraneous information leaving behind the fragments of forms that contain the beauty, nothing more, nothing less.
I arrange the composition to let it speak and exist as its own entity, so it can be expressed and embodied in a visual form that is as real as its conceptual or emotional form.
I work in an extremely deliberate fashion. Flaws and imperfections happen. I don't fix them, and this is by design. I deny imperfection. Imperfection is beauty. Imperfection the human element embodied. The human element is what separates simple illustration from the concept incarnate and creates a playing field where beauty may flourish." by Todd Brugman