BRUNA STUDE: ACCEPTANCE

I spent most of my life at sea, living on a boat. When we dropped anchor to build our home on Kaua`i, Hawai`i, I quietly mourned the loss of my freedom. I missed the sound of water lapping against the hull, the never-ending horizon extending into the distance, and the sky defining my seemingly boundaryless life.

A short sail out into the Pacific Ocean took me to Lehua Rock. It became my way to escape my new life and return for a moment to what I had left behind—sunlight disappearing into an endless depth, a familiar-feeling mystery and wonder.

As I looked up from below the surface, the sunlit rock had taken liquid form, terra firma rediscovered. Acceptance.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST

BRUNA STUDE

Bruna Stude is a self-taught contemporary artist best known for her large black-and-white ocean photographs and platinum/palladium prints, initially of marine life and later of the ocean deprived of marine species.

Picturing the ocean as essentially abstract and communicating it through a series of movements she epitomizes water as the lens “sees it”. The resulting imagery is riffing on a brushstroke, as Stude demands from her camera to immortalize the moment and the movement - at times resulting in a cursive character-like line found both in the work of a calligrapher or a random doodle.

Stude has exhibited in Hawaii, nationally and internationally. Her work is included in the collections of Hawai`i State Foundation for Culture and the Arts and Honolulu Museum of Art in Honolulu, Hawai`i,  Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris, and Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Czong, South Korea

Croatian-born, Stude lives on the island of Kauai`i, Hawai`i, of where she maintains a photographic/print studio.

www.brunastude.com