Removed from a Jesuit boarding school by his parents at age 14, Gil apprenticed as a restorer at The Restoration Workshop in the south of France. And thus, brings to his work a 500-year tradition of classical training in the skills and processes that have their genesis in the Renaissance. He received training in such basic skills and knowledge for artists as human anatomy and proportion, and how to visually convey human emotions through facial expressions and body positions depicted in drawing, painting, or sculpture. He studied the patterns of structure and growth in nature, and the physical properties of light and chemical properties of pigment that collectively produce our sensation and perception of color. He received a complete education in art history. He studied and learned how to emulate the various styles of artists through five centuries who had mastered all of these techniques, so that their work could be successfully restored, knowledge and expertise he applies to his own work.
Bruvel, a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who ranges wide in his reading and thinking, plumbs a world of ideas found in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and ancient cultures, mythology, and literature to find inspiration for his work. As a thinker, he always has been a seeker to discover the answers to the mystery of the transformative process of growth and metamorphosis in the world of human experience, consciousness, and spirit. As an artist, he seeks to give visual expression to these concepts.
Bruvel is unique as an artist in that he can discern and is interested in explicating how the conscious and unconscious mind work in tandem throughout the creative process he experiences. Graham Wallas (1926) identified the creative process as occurring in four stages: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. The most important stage of the creative process--incubation--occurs in the unconscious. Verification is where the solution arrived at in the unconscious becomes manifest to the conscious awareness, and when the artist thereupon paints or constructs the image s/he discovered "there". In newer creativity studies, Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi (1996) characterizes the experience of functioning in the creative state as one of being "in the flow".
Successful engagement by artists in the creative process yields what Joy Guilford (1956) identified as divergent ideas and forms characterized by fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Bruvel can articulate how he arrives at his artistic solutions throughout these stages of the creative process, and his work reflects the hallmarks of creativity realized in artistic form that can be seen in his drawings, paintings, and sculpture.
Gil's art has been exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, Singapore and Japan. In 1987, Gil was the youngest recipient ever of the prestigious bronze medal awarded by the Palais des Congress in Paris. His work has been shown at the Museum of Art & History in Anchorage, Alaska and was awarded first place for his sculpture The Passage by the Farmington Museum in Farmington, New Mexico. In the Spring 2006 issue of Sculptural Pursuit magazine he was awarded first place for his paintings and drawings for their annual Art & Literary competition. Further, in 2006 he was awarded first place from the Visual Arts Alliance in Houston, Texas for his sculptures Balance, The Passage-Artist Edition, and Dream of Water and The Award of Excellence from the New Jersey Equine Artists Association for his sculpture of Balance.
Gil Bruvel is 47 years old, born in Australia to French parents. At age four he returned with his parents to the south of France where he spent his formative years. He moved to the US permanently in 1990 and resided in Maui, Hawaii for 11 1/2 years. He currently lives with his wife in the Hill Country of Central Texas. With his fine art, Gil has amassed thousands of collectors of his original paintings, sculptures and fine art prints worldwide.