of Consonism

Freedom Becomes Answerable to Reality

Brumand traces the earliest basis of her art to a way of attending rather than to a recognizable style. Childhood encounters with the old bazaar and the natural world trained her to notice movement, changing relations, and forms that became visible through sustained looking. She later summarized the orientation as a commitment to explore freely while remaining truthful to the reality from which exploration began. Freedom meant testing a possibility; reality retained the authority to correct it. This relation between openness and consequence became more important than any specific childhood image. It established the practical discipline through which Brumand would later approach observation, material experiment, and emotional experience.

The same concern shaped her decision to decline a place at a fine-arts college. Brumand feared that an established visual language, adopted before her own had developed, would stand between perception and the force that first made her want to paint. She was protecting an unfinished language, rather than rejecting knowledge or technique. Independent study placed greater weight on observation, repetition, dissatisfaction, material feedback, and failure. The work itself had to expose what was vague, careless, or formally weak. By the time she began painting portraits and landscapes at about sixteen, freedom already carried an obligation: every departure had to remain answerable to the subject and to the consequences visible on the surface.

Beyond Realism, While Form Still Governs

Realism gave Brumand’s fidelity its first developed visual discipline. Meticulous detail, recognizable proportion, perspective, balance, and spatial organization kept the image accountable to what she observed. Technique served the living subject; it allowed a face or landscape to survive the passage into paint with its defining relations intact. This formal training remained essential to everything that followed, because later distortion and abstraction drew their precision from capacities already acquired through representation.

Over time, Brumand discovered that literal detail and fidelity were different. She could reduce descriptive information while preserving the relations that made a subject coherent. Perspective, balance, and spatial structure continued to organize the work even as surface likeness diminished. Abstraction therefore developed within her realist discipline. A deeper encounter with the subject revealed more exactly what the painting needed to preserve, and that precision allowed nonessential constraints to be released. Freedom expanded because fidelity had become more exact.

This discovery established a major pattern in Brumand’s development. Each deeper encounter with reality changed what fidelity required; once the essential demand became clearer, forms that obstructed it could loosen. Abstraction enlarged her repertoire without replacing representation, and formal knowledge remained available across later modes. At this point, however, form still governed what counted as a truthful painting. The years beside her son Doman introduced realities in which emotion, responsibility, uncertainty, and action mattered more than visible form. They required fidelity to move beyond visible correspondence.

When Emotion Took Command

Doman’s profound disabilities confronted Brumand with a practical problem for which love supplied commitment but no complete method. Early assessments described severe limits, while daily life continued to return responses that could be observed, tested, and developed. Brumand broke large aims such as movement, speech, reading, and writing into smaller capacities; she learned from professional knowledge, adapted it, and allowed Doman’s effort and responses to guide revision. Creativity acquired a demanding meaning: the search for a viable continuation when established methods were insufficient. Possibility could precede proof because it remained joined to work, observation, and correction. Years later, Doman walked, spoke, read, and wrote while continuing to live with profound disability and need for support.

The household also contained other children and other emotional realities. Anxiety, exhaustion, and repeated setbacks existed beside play, tenderness, happiness, and the needs of lives that could not be reduced to Doman’s urgency. Brumand painted at night, after the work of care, creating a space in which her own emotional life could remain active. She describes this practice as helping her return to responsibility with greater steadiness. Scarcity widened her material freedom: when canvas was unavailable, she worked on copper, radiographic film, worn leather, cardboard, pastry boxes, and other discarded surfaces. Painting became both inward necessity and practical experiment.

These years changed the object of fidelity. Emotional experience was no longer material to be fitted inside an inherited form; it became part of the reality by which form was judged. The emotions governing a painting arrived as more than isolated feelings. They belonged to wider organizations of perception, memory, meaning, expectation, and possible action. Consonism later calls such a relatively stable organization a psychological reference, or simply a reference, because it provides an organizing basis against which present experience and possible continuations are assessed. A reference gives experience continuity by grading present experience against its constraints: it shapes what a person notices, what appears credible or necessary, and what can be felt or done next. It can admit several responses while giving them a common orientation. When this article speaks of a grief-shaped or hope-shaped reference, it therefore means the wider organization operating through that emotion. Perspective, balance, and structured spatial relations remained available, but Brumand strained or suspended them when they obstructed the emotional organization the painting needed to preserve. Emotion took command through judgment, and formal authority became conditional upon emotional truth.

Brumand often entered an absorbed, meditative working state, supported by classical music that corresponded to the emotional field. In this state, judgment remained active through feeling and embodied action. She retained, revised, rejected, emphasized, or repeated a passage according to whether it remained faithful to the reference then shaping her encounter with the work. Each decision left a visible consequence on the support. When another reference became accessible, the earlier consequence remained and entered the conditions of the next decision. A painting therefore accumulated as a history of feeling, judgment, action, and renewed encounter.

As Brumand painted from more than one reference within the same surface, the first Consonist relations formed. Co-influence makes distinct references active in one developing field: each shapes judgment and leaves consequences the other can later encounter. A grief-shaped decision may establish darkness, weight, or closure; a later contribution shaped by tenderness or hope must work within that inherited field and leave consequences of its own. Reciprocal consequence begins when the influence returns. Grief changes what hope can express, and hope’s altered expression then changes what grief can mean or produce. When these exchanges are preserved and accumulate, they form composition in the Consonist sense: a developing history in which each intervention inherits earlier consequences and alters the conditions of what follows. This meaning differs from the visual arrangement of a finished image. During the Doman years, the history remained fragile, but Brumand attributes an important corrective role to it. Across the following decade, emotional fidelity, persistent consequence, and early composition prepared a practice that could preserve several pressures within one work. Zoya’s death would expose the limits of that practice.

The Break in Painting and the Passage Through Words

Zoya died at nineteen. The loss severed Brumand’s access to the artistic relations that had previously sustained her. Nature and music remained present but no longer carried their former meaning; color belonged to a language she could not enter. Grief became the condition within which thought occurred, and movement toward life felt like disloyalty to Zoya’s absence. The early compositional practice of the Doman years had been real, yet its relations were too weakly accumulated to carry this rupture. Painting stopped.

Words provided a narrower form of continuity. One word could stand beside another, and one sentence could follow the previous one, allowing Brumand to approach part of the grief when its whole could not be held at once. Writing created a place within the loss rather than a path beyond it. She wrote, stopped, questioned, and returned, without identifying one decisive turning point. Repetition preserved enough relation for another sentence to become possible.

Brumand recalls that words gradually made room for color. Their sequence reopened the possibility of combination, but the earlier painting practice could not simply resume. She needed a field capable of preserving overwhelming emotion while remaining open to movement, deformation, and unfamiliar relation. The return began without a finished image: fluid color could move before Brumand knew what the painting, or the life surrounding it, should become. A psychological rupture had become a material problem.

Developing a Medium That Could Move

The first paintings after Brumand’s return were predominantly black, dark, and painful. Internally, grief felt without boundary; on the surface, a consequence formed under its influence acquired color, density, direction, edge, and duration. Brumand could approach the work, leave it, and return under another state of attention. The painting preserved an encounter that would otherwise have disappeared with the moment that produced it. Pain became materially present and revisable, changing Brumand’s position within what she suffered while leaving the reality of the loss intact.

This new artistic task required a precise material behavior. Paint had to move freely enough to disclose configurations Brumand could not design in advance, while preserving local chromatic relations through substantial deformation. The surface needed to remain workable long enough for her to perceive what had emerged, judge it, and intervene. Drying then had to preserve selected consequences so later actions could build upon them. The problem joined mobility, differentiation, working time, and material memory in one system.

Brumand developed that system through comparative trials. She tested several types of paint and selected metallic paint as the most suitable base. She compared solvents, chose petroleum, and adjusted its proportion until viscosity and drying time became practically controllable. The calibrated mixture created an interval in which paint could flow semi-freely, collide, stretch, and bend while remaining open to intervention. Her technical innovation lay in coordinating existing materials around the behavior her practice required.

Support trials completed the system. Brumand selected medium-density fiberboard (MDF) and X-ray film because their surfaces sustained the movement and working interval she sought. Radiographic film had appeared earlier among the materials she reused when canvas was scarce; it now became a deliberate component of a coordinated method. Paint, solvent, proportion, support, and procedure worked together, and different later works could draw selectively from that system. The medium was distinctive because of the relation Brumand developed among its parts.

The result was calibrated unpredictability. Brumand controlled the initial colors, viscosity, support, direction of tilt, and timing of intervention, while exact local configurations emerged through flow and collision. Tilting redirected the field; a painting knife preserved an edge, divided or joined regions, and changed the continuation of a form. These actions translated judgment into material change. Brumand encountered what the paint had produced, decided which possibility mattered, and altered the conditions again. Large structures could deform while local color relations remained recognizable enough to continue shaping the work.

Brumand’s initial palettes arose from the emotional field of each painting. Because their local relations survived movement, differently organized emotions could leave distinguishable chromatic consequences within the same surface. In Consonist terms, a function is the contribution a reference makes to the developing process: what it registers, preserves, constrains, or makes possible. In the early post-Zoya works, grief preserved attachment, memory, and the reality of Zoya’s absence. Lighter passages sometimes made another function perceptible before Brumand could consciously accept it, carrying the possibility of continuation. She kept them within the dark field and allowed grief to test whether their promise was truthful. Hope needed grief to prevent continuation from becoming an evasion of loss, while grief needed a credible continuation to release the future from total closure. Color gave these functions a material form that could remain present long enough for their relation to develop.

The persistent surface made these encounters available across changing emotional states. A configuration formed under grief remained perceptible when hope or compassion later became accessible; their response then altered what grief encountered on return. As this exchange recurred, co-influence became durable, reciprocal consequences accumulated, and composition developed into a shared material history rather than a momentary encounter. The repeated exchange also produced early functional reliance: each reference began accomplishing part of its role through conditions supplied by the other. Hope drew truthfulness from grief, while grief drew future-opening capacity from hope and compassion. A threshold work in the ordered sequence makes the new artistic range visible through fluid deformation, tree-like and landscape relations, ambiguous form, and increasing figuration. The developed medium had become capable of preserving difference through change and allowing the work’s own consequences to guide its continuation.