BIOGRAPHY
I met Bryten Goss for the first time at a party in Hollywood at the end of the 90s. So far, everybody I had met there was connected to the movie industry in some way. Practically all guys I talked to were actors or screenplay writers and all girls actresses or models. So when I saw this fair-haired young man who seemed to be friends with everybody, I asked him what he was doing and to my surprise he said he was a painter.
He asked me if I wanted to see his studio and I said yes. A few days later, I visited him at his apartment on Wilshire in a building that looked like an inflated Americanized version of a French chateau, with doorman, reception and all. His ample loft was furnished with taste in the arts and crafts style and everything was extremely tidy, unlike any other artist's studio I have ever seen.
Bryten looked to be in his early twenties, but when he spoke he gave the impression of a self-assured, much older, experienced, and mature person. And he was courtly in an almost old-fashioned way.
He was not connected to any art-scene, was not represented by a gallery, and never attended art-school. He didn't fit any cliché of a contemporary artist. His sincerity regarding art reminded me of how I imagine artists of the 19th and early 20th century would have been.
He started painting in his early childhood and he was never in doubt that he was here to paint.
When asked during an interview what had led him into painting he said: "Well, I always drew and painted. But I do remember something that really made me serious about it; I think I was 14 or 15, I was at the Norton Simon Museum and I saw this small rough portrait by Cezanne, I think it depicted his uncle. I didn't particularly love the painting but for some reason I was completely overwhelmed emotionally. I couldn't stop thinking about it for days: that's when I realized the importance of Fine Art, how such a simple image could make such an effect on someone."
In those days he spent much time with his longtime friend Jason Lee, who soon became a skateboard star and later a world-renowned movie and TV actor. Kids of suburban L.A, both were not very interested in sports and other children's games, dreaming instead of being artists. They hung out together, Jason writing and Bryten painting.
When he was seventeen Bryten traveled through Europe, spending four months in Paris, where he lived and worked in a loft together with another painter and a sculptor and visited the museums as often as he could to study the works of the great masters.
"I think Stanley Spencer is a great painter," Bryten said later, "and I also always loved the paintings of Balthus, Freud, Schiele, Giacometti and Degas as well, but I feel especially Caravaggio has been an influence on me."
On one of his journeys, he finally ended up on Ireland's stormy west coast where he rented rooms in small hotels, sometimes for months, and painted. His subjects were always people - in pubs in the streets or in their homes.
When I found out about his love for Ireland I invited him to our home in Tipperary, where he spent several summers fly-fishing and painting in one of our towers where he had set up his studio.
From beginning on, it was the human body that was the central theme of his work, and once back in L.A. he started to paint female nudes.
The way he painted was exceptionally honest, raw, frugal, crude, unadorned, and in stark contrast to the bumptious and pretentious attitude that sometimes dominates the contemporary art-market. He was a little bit like Parsifal, with a rarely seen innocence and naiveté in today's art-world; almost like an autistic child developing his own artistic language. Like a lonely mountaineer, he was groping his way up.
Around 2000, he stepped onto new aesthetic territory when he began his "Triumph of Death" series. Up to that point he was focusing on the single figure, but now a surprising dramatic narrative entered his work. Large paintings of apocalyptic tales of chaos, riots, turmoil and buildings ablaze in the streets of downtown L.A.
In 2005 he began his "Women on Pigs" and "Pope" series, and the formats became larger, his technique more sophisticated, the colors richer and his concepts more complex.
On his last major painting he had worked over a year: "Women Riding Pigs" (25 x 6 feet) for collector Roberto Santos of Mexico. He delivered the work himself to the collector's estate, hung it and put on the finishing touches when he fell ill. Despite his waning health he returned home to prepare for his next exhibition in New York City, which was to be hosted by his longtime friend and patron, Danny Masterson.
His health worsened and complicated by pneumonia, his heart stopped beating on October 26, 2006.
(Bio write up taken from "Introduction" for Bryten Goss 2008 Catalogue, written by Gottfried Helnwein, painter)
Los Angeles, 2008
