When place and memory combine, the result is  a powerful force for personal history: A random street corner full of overgrowth can remind you of childhood places you once roamed. A friend’s den can recall those same quiet rooms your grandparents had. And old furniture or small figurines lining shelves of a thrift shop – though they were never yours – seem familiar as if they must have belonged to you at some point in time.

Brian Scott Campbell is a Brooklyn-based artist. His most recent artwork draws from memories, dreams and the magic that slips in and out of ordinary life.

You can walk into Campbell’s black and white drawings as if they were chambers for memories or dreams. Interior spaces furnished with comfy couches and chairs, a bear rug and house plants – combine with exterior spaces bounded by limitless or even invisible ceilings. Walls become transparent, revealing gray geometric shapes, watchful cartoon eye cut-outs and patterns that enclose. At the same time, the drawings’ hallucinatory glow disorients and yields your imagination to quarters that blend into seemingly unexplored landscapes – like hard-to-explain vivid dreams and memories.

What was the place you grew up like? And how important are places and settings in your art?

I grew up in the Midwest, in the flat suburban city of Columbus, Ohio. It’s only been a few years since I moved to the east coast. My work is pretty much all about a sense of place and feelings about those places which are familiar yet oddly so… I think that the Midwest comes up often in my work, but I don’t want to be too specific to any one place.

Can you describe your studio where you draw? Where do you like to go in Brooklyn to get inspiration?

I have a shared studio space with two other artists in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. There is plenty of distraction in my neighborhood, so I have to be pretty disciplined to get any work done. There is a steady stream of inspiration in Brooklyn. All my friends have studios here, and there are small, amazing galleries everywhere. A couple of my friends run their own space down the street from me called Soloway Gallery. There are amazing shows popping up all the time within a walk from me (Pierogi, Parkers Box, Storefront, Famous Accountants, etc.). In terms of my work and source material for drawings, I’m sure that Brooklyn is an influence. There is a kind of blurring of inside/outside everywhere in New York. Mattresses are always on the sidewalks and people are obsessed with house plants.

Your art explores memory and history. Can you describe specific examples?

Collective history and personal memories, or at least the feeling of this is present in the work. This is further emphasized by the fact that these are black and white images. We tend to associate black and white with dreams and photography. Sometimes my source material is taken from found photographs of late modern buildings, old magazines depicting interior spaces, personal family photos of vacations, or even drawings that I have made of my apartment.

And how do the recurring images – displaced furniture, interior settings dissolving into nature and many interweaving shapes and patterns – reflect the idea of memory and life?

I guess I see furniture and the objects we surround ourselves with to be much more personal… partly because we choose to live with it, and we bring it with us when we move somewhere new. Although furniture is architectural in some ways, it is much more delicate and tangible. I think that the folk patterns and the floral printed chairs, etc. remind me of Ohio and my grandmother. It comes against the severity of the landscape.

What medium do you work in and how do you describe your style?

I work strictly in drawing materials such as graphite pencil and charcoal, but recently I have been incorporating gouache, ink, and acrylics in blacks and grays. I aspire for my work to exist where Ruisdael and Bruegel meet Ed Paschke and David Hockney, but with the bluntness of form and simultaneous softness of late Phillip Guston. We’ll see if I get there. Hopefully I will.

There’s a glow around the images in your art, which makes them seem ephemeral and unstable, like the vanishing memory of a dream. What role does illusion and magic play in your work?

In an interview that I saw with David Lynch about Twin Peaks and some of his films, he talked about wanting the viewer to feel that they have walked into a waking dream. Always with dreams you have an uncomfortable combination of something familiar and uncanny. Illusion and magic has everything to do with this, as well as the history of the photographic image which I certainly utilize. I feel that when certain areas are persuasively illusionistic it makes the image that much more surreal when you consider all of the elements of the drawing at once. In other words, somehow the image becomes even stranger when it is drawn with the intention to be realistic, and when those images are just on the verge of abstraction. I do try to have a measure of irresolution, which may relate to your idea of the drawings appearing unstable.

These shaded settings are also inspired by the desire for escape.  How would you describe these places, and where do you think they lead to (like the path in Before the Sighting {After Brecht})?

Maybe the pathway in Before the Sighting (After Brecht) leads to something that looks like a greyed out Rousseau painting, or maybe a crappy looking hotel. I’m not really sure. I see all of these different images to be part of the same world. They’re all connected. In Before the Sighting you have this impossible image of a mountain range that is far too close to the middle ground, and that is combined with a parking garage, palm trees, Manitoba hay bales, and a living room chair and rug. It’s a surreal montage of recalled imagery, some of which is mundane and ordinary, whereas others are far more adrift and “other”.

You also use music as a source of inspiration for your work, borrowing the haunting and chaotic Stones song “Gimme Shelter” as a title for one of your works. How did this song guide you in creating this particular work?

Well I love the Stones, and I love this song, especially the line “Gimme, gimme shelter before I fade away.” But I’m not sure if this song has much to do with my drawing conceptually. The title is actually a mash-up of The Rolling Stone’s “Gimme Shelter” with Black Flag’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme”. I made a drawing last year that was titled The Complex (Hotel California). I have to give my friend Andy Webber credit for that idea. The drawing really has nothing to do with the Eagles.  In fact I really hate the Eagles.  I’m more of a Steely Dan guy. The title just made sense somehow, and was really funny to me. Titles are important, but I consider them as their own thing. For me they relate more to the mood of a piece, or the attitude.

How else does music play a role in your creative process?

I listen to a lot of music, so that will always have an influence on my ideas, references and humor, but it happens subconsciously. I love the imagery that you find in Neil Young’s music, and I listen to a lot of psychedelic music from the 60s and 70s, so I see the possible connection there. In the studio I listen to books on tape, or something minimal like Brian Eno’s atmospheric albums, Terry Riley, or Les Rallizes Dénudés.  I think anyone could make a great drawing if they listen to enough Les Rallizes Dénudés.

What activities outside of drawing interest you?

I have a blog that I regularly update called A+M Blog.  It’s a simple kind of micro-blogging site of images, video clips, and artist links or gallery links. I wanted to start the blog as a way of sharing the artwork of my friends that I felt really excited by, and to share the music that I was currently listening to. I’ve been surprised and delighted to see that people really like visiting. I’ve also been surprised in the way that the blog has been formative in creating friendships with artists that I admire, and wouldn’t know otherwise.  I should mention that a good friend of mine, Joshua Abelow convinced me to start blogging a little over a year ago while talking in a small bar in Johnson, Vermont. He has a fantastic blog called ART BLOG ART BLOG. Even more than drawing and being illuminated by the blue glow of my computer screen, I enjoy hanging out with my lovely wife, petting our cat, record collecting, hiking when I can get out of the city, eating grapefruit, and lying to people about training for a marathon.

- Brian Scott Campbell, artist