Over the course of forty years, working in virtual seclusion from the mainstream, Daniel Brush has created an unparalleled body of work. His career includes international painting exhibitions, a fifteen-year period of seclusion and study, and an intense immersion into the mysteries of gold. His large-scale canvases and drawings—inspired by the expressive, disciplined gestures of the Noh theatre—integrate the artist's profound understanding of Asian thought with the removed drama in modernist painting. Brush's three-dimensional works—products of solitary thought, study and experimentation—are included in many public, private and royal collections. These works include delicate granulated gold domes in the traditions of the ancient goldsmiths, jewel-encrusted objects of virtue and fantasy and gold and steel sculptures, some only a few inches high. Imbued with a timeless quality and mesmerizing in the intricacy and daring of the fabrication, Brush's objects bear comparison with the work of historical masters. His current wall pieces in blued steel and pure gold engage the ambient light. Brush’s table works in stainless steel and pure gold, hand-engraved with thousands of rhythmic lines, are visual poems that record the passage of time. Daniel Brush has developed a rigorous personal aesthetic marked by its intellectual force, mastery of techniques and the science of materials. His idiosyncratic, contemplative work marks a journey of evolving mastery, and bodies forth a deeply expressive voice in American art.
"Some people would consider it impossible to do what he does"
– Nicolas Bos, CEO of Van Cleef and Arpels
"His creations transcend the realm of jewellery, goldsmithing or art. He has developed his own special world of craftsmanship and creativity in which each object is virtually a museum piece."
– François Curiel, Chairman of Asian-Pacific, Christie's
"It is the result of years of incubation, years of isolation and complete immersion, which have produced his unique and mysterious objects - they are made objects, and yet they seem found. Some of them almost remind me of meteorites, but meteorites from the artist's heaven."
– Dr. Oliver Sacks
“Brush is a Prometheus, stealing lightning from the gods to make objects as miraculous as they are.”
– Donald Kuspit
“If I were Alexander the Great and had fought my way across the Indus, to restore my equanimity I would retire with one of these objects.”
– Jeremy Adamson
“A creative person knows that what he or she calls work is nothing of the sort. It is a process of life. So, to understand what Daniel Brush does, it helps to consider the whole of his existence: his dedication bordering on obsession, his rituals and routines; his stimulations—reading Zen to do sculpture, sweeping the floor to find a mood, eating the same meal every day for twenty years to find comfort, seeking solitude to find enlightenment. That way, knowing the obliqueness of the artist’s life, and even his apparent dysfunction, it is possible to approach an understanding of what the word creation means.”
– Paul Theroux
"Why do I work with this? I work with it, because I don't understand it," says Brush.
– CBS Sunday Morning , January 25, 2004