Mantel installation, Charlottesville, VA 2000
Landscape of Yellowstone countryside, 1999, wedding gift to sister, Heather (pictured with Brian in framed photo) and Chris MacAulay that summer, also pictured: Woody Allen, Bob Dylan, Picasso, elk antler found along Snake River, Jackson, Wyoming, Conch shell from BVI, Ocean liner "Manhattan," Walter Payton jersey, Tropical shirt from Key West, small painted pillow "dream catcher," from Primitivism series, watercolor and small figurine "Thinker" by Christian Marenbach.

Austin Palmer-Smith, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1999
Landscape of Bend in Yellowstone River painted minutes earlier by, Brian David Kauppi

First recognition of the age of earth became visibly apparent on a road trip in the west. They packed the van with more canvas than clothes, tubes of paint, turpentine and cans of baked beans. They bathed in rivers and lakes and the Pacific Ocean, wearing the same clothes for two months, sleeping in the van or camping in the parks.
The pock marked face of the desert, the fossil fields where dinosaur bones had been excavated passed by the van's windows baking in summer's broad sunlight. Their ghosts retraced their giant steps through the landscape on the scale of the standing buttes monumental and flashing before their eyes. The speed of the van was lost in a stretch of smooth desert road so long and straight it went beyond conceivable proportion and scale. The distances travelled, the masses of mountains they passed by and through were difficult to appreciate and the quality of road was automatically taken for granted. Herds of wild animals like indian tribes near extinction trudging over hills and through forests pursued, afraid and interdependent, they too had a language and society, an ancient gypsy culture, a caste system and similarly treated their members and outcasts. The adoration and protection of a calf walks between the legs of its strongest family members, the shame and dismissal of the old and weak fall behind the pack and are devoured, the crazy bull is left to his own madness in a thicket, the long grass mashed down from his naps into a huge round bed of dust. Their smells lingered in the landscape and spoke of their plight and suffering. Their grunts could be heard traveling on the winds across miles of flat plains as if they were whispering in his ears the secrets of their traditions and the ancient history of their evolution. So coyotes really do howl at the full moon...

Austin Palmer-Smith, stretching canvas in parking lot of Glen Canyon, Arizona, 1999

Exhibition Opening "Primitivism," Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, 1997

The Salvation Army Thrift Store in Charlottesville sold pillows for fifty cents. The bin was large and looked like a mountainous population of forgotten dreams and lazy Sunday lounging. Used clothing had lives and legacies as did these couch potatoes. The bin was emptied into the van and taken to the art department, pillow cases knifed and discarded, replaced with bedsheets sewn into bed sized pillow cases, monumental sacks of everyman's hangovers and dreams. They were tied with rope into bulbous sections and painted with latex house paint. Some remained stuffed, others emptied of their stuffing and hung like expressionist tie dyed tapestries. Monumental Dream Catchers.

Exhibition Opening "Primitivism," Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, 1997

Studio during production of "Primitivism," Summer Research Fellowship, Fayerweather Hall, University of Virginia, 1997

Before painting "Guiness Can" 1997, from the Con Sum Series, Charlottesville, VA 1999

AQUA.cat
an Auto-tonic Reverberations production
2000

A postcard addressed to Eric Laine 114 Howard Dr., #2 Charlottesville, VA 22903, pictures a World War II military ship at port and caption on back: "Liberty Ship, Jeremiah O'Brien coming into Jacksonville, Florida, August 26, 1994 on its return from 50th Anniversary Trip to Normandy," inscribed:
Eric-
Today I was stopped behind an old lady driving alone, trying to turn back onto Route 1 to Key West where tourists were flooding the area, driving upwards of 55 mph. She pulls out nice and slow when a pickup truck full of open white paint buckets slams full speed into the driver side door, totals the car instantly, as I sit watching a tapestry of paint suspended in the air fly over the cab and splatter all over the accident. Highs of 85 on the beach, beautiful clouds, nice breeze, wish you were here.
-Brian
P.S. Say hey to Jimmy for me.

Recycled American Flags exhibited outside Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, 2000
Installation for Aqua, an Auto-Tonic Reverberations production

Walking along The Lawn (the original quad of the University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson) under pavilion awnings, numbered in Greek, my own time stops as I have forgotten when I had left and where I needed to go. Cloudy today, humid, wet, green grass. It must have just rained. I wonder how it is still so warm. The indecipherable haze above gives a communal feeling of enclosure. To the individual: anonymity. The Conscious mind is stagnant, recollecting the interior; solid objects, daily routines, convinced against impending collapsibility, the infinite in the infinitesimal.
The Lawn is like a carpet with even hills like ramps for handicap accessibility, pampered for the upcoming spring tours. The oaks have tar-filled wounds and maintain a domestic obedience, planted systematically to the beat of the columned pavilions, and the rhythmic pattern of the brick laid walk. The Lawn inspires and perpetuates interior thinking. Today the economy of walking is kept to the brick paths. A common voice of lawn dwellers behind wooden doors is heard as my eyes pass by their mailslots.
The Lawn stretches and recedes from view. I don't bother looking, until the sound of two boys, one bat, and one ball awakens my interest. A heavy plastic toy contact: a loud splash of sound defines the surrounding buildings as like a large colander.
I smile: pitching... the batter fouls one off, and catches the next with one hand. I gather details of a passerby: eyecontact... yes.
I instantly notice a ball rolling across the brick walk directly in front of me, covered in duct tape, I field it perfectly in time, throw it towards the batter with abandon, through an empty spring tree.
Batter says, "Thanks."
I am speechless.
Mighty boy, please, believe me to be truly a spirit.

Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, 2000
A Love Supreme; Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, Psalm

"The instant you reach what is interesting in terms of meaningfulness, words stop.
-Wittengenstein


This: the inaudible, not satisfied with abstract thought, wants empirical observation, but does not conceive the framed and reframed world as practical, human sense in conversation. A common speed resolves the essence of religion into the essence of man. But the practice of rediscovery is not an abstraction inherent in each particular individual. The repetitive instance of man is the totality of picky patterns. Of the everyday household, one who does not enter upon a criticism of this real academic environment, is therefore obliged:

1.) to abstract from the historical process, mirrored in the religious sentiment, and to postulate natural waves, an abstract-isolated-human ripple

2.) to conceive the nature of man only in terms of progressive explosions, as an inner and mute universal, which unites the many individuals in a purely natural (splash) way.

Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, 2000
Installation of Aqua, an Auto-Tonic Reverberations production

:An excerpt of A Way Up and Down
from Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe
A collection of poetry by Tan Lin

...Blue streaks of luck: I rent a room
And a place to paint water.
I number the Lenses and Liquids:
It reaches a rippling site or cool ember.
Such prophets: the white can of paint
Or poisonous plant, set afire.
A medium. A hand points
or peels back a canvas. My heart
falls out: frame for the unattended
motion, fur on an animal, speck of dust on a child's cap gun, the needle swimming...

Studio, Fayerweather Hall, University of Virginia, 2000
Provided by the Aunspaugh Fifth Year Fellowship

An interview of Brian David Kauppi conducted by Tan Lin on March 3, 2000

You seem to be harking back to the spiritual heroism of the abstract expressionists in your latest paintings.

I've always had a certain personal affinity with the aesthetics of the expressionists, the fact that it is oil painting and that in such a "movement" a group of artists can be so individual. I always wondered how someone could group together the paintings of Pollock and Barnett Newman, Rothko and Willem DeKooning. But all painters are related by the stillness and silence of painting. It seems to me that especially DeKooning, the father of action painting, or the drips of Pollock suspended in mid fling are presented as silent museum relics, dead and still. I prefer Rothko to Newman and Pollock to DeKooning for their inherent anti-gravity suspension. I've always been uncomfortable in front of a Pollock drip painting for the way none of the drips drip down like on an easel painting. I like being attracted and repelled by art. I seek paradise in paint, but I am intrigued, naturally by war.

What do you know about war?

Very little. Basically whatever narratives I've picked up from the movies, books, and the history channel. There is no real knowledge though, and it seems my generation is generally isolated from that reality. About the closest I've come is second hand accounts from veterans. Those seem the most tangible.

Tell me about the war paintings.

I am interested in the unknown and the unknowable of war. Its historical and social presence looms like an abyss into which we individually collage an unspecific narrative, not unlike spirituality. It is taboo, it is heroic, it is life and death, it is family and tradition, and naturally, throughout history, most wars have been acted out in the name of religion or opposing ideologies. That is how it is exclusively human, differing from other animal acts of violence. It is our nature to contemplate and to maintain an order to the chaos of the unknown. Atheism is a nonprofit (prophet) organization, and there is no denying the history of war. Ultimately and ideally one reaches a genuine embrace, faith in the unknown: A Love Supreme. Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, Psalm.

Eric Laine, DJ, Videographer, Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, 2000
Exhibition Aqua, an Auto-Tonic Reverberations production, Opening night

This series of four panels you call A Love Supreme deals with repetition, change of depth and perspective and seems to mark a narrative progression, what is your perspective on multiples?

Frank Stella once tried to explain that he wanted to make the most important painting possible with relation to his time period within art history. He compared his making the black paintings with the painting of Velasquez, and he may as well have been painting panels for how specifically one was related to another. He seems to have really gone the distance on observing the physical boundaries of paintings, not necessarily "painting" but "paintings," looking at them the same way he is aware of architecture. (Which is one of the most important lessons in art history, I think, and leads to an awareness of scale and installation.) Although Stella claimed to discount any metaphorical interpretations of his black paintings, they inevitably relate to the sublime. Rothko and painters of the sublime offer a tangible construction of the infinite, the unknown, thus an udience is left with nothing but the work and themselves and most likely they have trouble relating themselves specifically to a suspended color field varying between yellow and orange. I want to force the issue of a personal agenda which all have had some kind of opinion about. This is what brings me to a representational vehicle.

What do you mean by representational vehicle, because many of your paintings are completely abstract.

When taken out of the group context, the series, they are abstract. But within the representational vehicle of marine imagery or television images of the earth they stand with an aggressive relation to the viewer. The concept must drive the craft.

So then you are talking more about the conceptual; titles, history, etc.

Well, not completely, I think the representational vehicle is still functional within the paintings without the titles and any of this, what is being recorded here. As a series, the paintings can stand together and their representational pieces can locate the viewer relatively specifically. Some are even specifically created through a process based on the spontaneous images that arise out of repetitive sensual expression of painting.

Explain this a bit more.

It is a process that mimics the natural optical phenomena we go through everyday, when focusing on distant horizons or out-of-focus objects, when a crumpled piece of newspaper rattling in the corner of where a building meets the sidewalk you're walking on alarms you as possibly a live raccoon... but during the day? Could be rabid, abandoned, lost. But then you see as you approach: just a New York Times. I like to paint the raccoon, but usually it comes out as a New York Times and I think both are less powerful isolated.

Exhibition Aqua, an Auto-Tonic Reverberations Production, Fayerweather Gallery, University of Virginia, Opening night

You seem to rely on coincidence quite a bit in your work, describe its significance.

I try to focus my exploits on the coincidental rather than the ironic which, to me, seems to marvel at the simple idea that everything and anything can be metaphor, whereas coincidence takes this for granted and is a personal or collective construction that acknowledges especially pertinent metaphors to a specific timely agenda. Irony is the language of the pure science phenomenology. Coincidence is constructed of applied science, and therefore it is subject to continuous expansion or temporal mutations, reevaluations. It can become multidimesional, growing exponentially, something I like to call reverberation. Robert Smithson once wrote: "On the edge of this prehistoric machine age were pre- and post-World War II suburban houses. The houses mirrored themselves into colorlessness. Children were throwing rocks at each other near a ditch."
I really like this overall perspective on time and its relation to space. In reference to time and a statement on the progress of technological advances towards a utopian future, Smithson uses the word "obsolete." He says, "The future does not exist, or it it exists, it is the obsolete in reverse," which doesn't seem to make much sense grammatically, but if you can picture time as space and yourself on a time line, and everything to the left is obsolete, then the future as a mirror image of the past is the obsolete in reverse. Coincidence is the mirror image of the obsolete.

So explain how the story of the car accident you witnessed in Florida affected your work.

I'm not sure it really affected my work. The scary part of it was how it seemed my work affected my witnessing the accident. The coincidence of witnessing that accident in real time was what anchored my marine battle paintings into a pertinent metaphor of contemporary life. Destruction of paradise. Today we do it through tourism which, to me, is hard to say if it is good or bad. Art is what makes life more interesting than art.

A Love Supreme: Acknowledgement, Resolution, Pursuance, Psalm. 2000
Four Pannels, 4' x 8', oil on canvas over plywood.

Jasper Johns:
"The things which have interested me in painting and in thinking are the things (and I, of course, tell lies) that can't be located. Or are the things which turn into something else while you locate them, or are things that are located so nicely that you know they can't survive. But it has never interested me, just the idea of forming a territory or a thought and defending it."

Recycled American Flags on display outside Fayerweather Gallery, 2000
After month long exhibition of Aqua, an Auto-Tonic Reverberations production, controversial vandalism allows one flag to touch ground while still on exhibit.

Travel like a king. Listen to your inner voice. A higher wisdom is at work for you. Conquering stumbling blocks come easier when the clockwork is in tune with the infinite. Every ending is a new beginning. Life is an endless unfoldment. Change your mind and you change your relation to time. You can find the answer, the solution lies within the problem. The answer is in every question. Dig it? Inspire yourself. Your life is yours. It fits you like your skin. You gravitate to that which you secretly love most. You meet in life the exact reproduction of your own thoughts. There is no chance, coincidence, or accident, in a world ruled by law and divine order. You rise as high as your dominant aspiration. You descend to the level of your lowest concept of yourself. The infinite intelligence within you knows the answers. Its nature is to respond to your thoughts. Be careful of thought seeds you plant in the garden of your mind, because seeds grow after their kind. Think right and you can fly. The kingdom of heaven is within. Free your mind and your ass will follow.
-George Clinton

Tree House, Lago Atitlan, Guatemala, 2002
Sun beam through a crack in the wall crosses the face of Yogi Yogananda's photo in Valentine's Day shrine.
Landscape painted from Garden view of the invisible hotel, San Marcos, Lago Atitlan

Before Grand Teton Range, Driggs, Idaho, 2004
Landscape of same view painted minutes earlier.

Familia Aravena Gonzalez, Almorzando, Verano, 2003
Landscape Painting from Los Lleuques, Chile