Halley Bruno: An Indulgent Reflection

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Dragons, swords, wolves; sunsets of the deepest purples and pinks; soft phrases murmured far down in the catacombs of her mind. Halley Bruno, aka Cinder Ash, is an artist who extracts inspiration from many sources. She has muses found in books, films, other painters, but all of her muses must be filtered through her subconscious before they bubble up through her brain and eventually find themselves somewhere on a canvas. And whether her work connects to an audience or not, her emphasis is always to create art she will enjoy.

I spotted her one afternoon at Cafe on 1st putting up her scenes of fantastical landscapes and creatures, of the most surreal and unexpected colors. I couldn’t believe what she was getting to come out of a paintbrush. How does she get those colors on a canvas? Where are these scenes coming from? A few weeks later, I’d get the chance to sit down with her and figure it all out.

“I aspire a lot to create art that evokes the same responses people get when they’re listening to music,” she tells me. She wants her work to go beyond words and take viewers to a place beyond time and space; somewhere, some moment that can be reached through pure, primordial emotion. “I [also] look up to the Grandmother of Performance art, Marina Ambrović,” she adds. “Everything meant everything to her.” She reflects on Ambrović who made her whole life akin to a theatre piece. Bruno specifically calls to when the Grandmother of Performance ended her relationship of many years by having her and her partner begin to walk at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China, then meet in the middle, say goodbye and never see one another again. “I aspire to make, not just my art beautiful,” she continues, “but my life as meaningful and beautiful as I can make it as well. I wanna do one thing how I do everything.”

If you gaze over Bruno paintings one thing that catches the eye, as I mentioned, is the intensity of her colors. They contain the brightest complexions from the deepest ends of the rainbow. She says this is because she uses very saturated paints and does a fair amount of experimenting in her work. But part of what makes her want to create such intense colors is the setting of Salt Lake City itself. “I’ll see a beautiful sunset or the clouds, and I’ll almost crash my car,” she says. “They’re so beautiful that I can’t stop looking. I try to emulate light and color kind of like a sunset.”

For an artist living in Salt Lake, though, it’s often a question of whether the city feels big enough to showcase and move work in a lucrative manner. In the case of Bruno, however, she doesn’t feel like she’s outgrown her current setting yet. “I could do what I want to do anywhere because I feel like the main satisfaction I’m getting out of it is personal,” she says. “But in terms of making a living, or having places to show my art, yeah, I think there are places I can do that. I haven’t reached the upper limits of that.”

Her real struggle as an artist doesn’t have to do with a lack of setting but rather a dilemma of whether she making art for herself and the sake of art, or for the sake of just showing it off. “It’s really easy to lose your integrity as an artist and get super caught up in this art dream,” she contemplates, ”and then you start making your art for the wrong reasons.” Reasons ranging from getting clicks, gaining followers, quantitative recognition, etc. “You start making your art in - what we all do - the Instagram-machine, or wanting status.”

Though Bruno does admit that it’s nice to have a certain recognition as a painter, she knows that’s not why she is a painter in the first place. She does it to perpetuate herself to her self, and if someone else pays attention while she does it, well that’s nice too. Her current best example of this is her self-released comic book Sade that can be found on her website, halleybruno.com. Consisting of few words, it’s a visually impacting sequence of images that will provoke what it may, but for Bruno, it is her communicating with herself. “It’s personal. It’s really self-indulgent,” she says to me. “Because I’m using it to reflect myself to myself, but with the qualities that I want to manifest more.” It’s some of the best of her work because it’s for her, by her, without the risk of someone else gets too involved.

Sade and more of Bruno’s work can be found on her website, and her paintings can currently be seen and purchased at Cafe on 1st.