It all started on the way to the dump. Brent Greene was finishing up some yard work at his house west of town when his eye fell on the lengths of bamboo he had cut down.
“I’m getting ready to take it out, and it’s just, like – there’s got to be something I can do with it,” he says.
What Greene ultimately decided to do with the bamboo, as well as other assorted pieces of vegetation culled from his one-acre lot, is make sculpture. And what began as a hobby a little over a year ago is now a career for Greene, who calls his business “Gnu Bamboo.”
Local residents can judge the merits of Greene’s art at Gallery 14 in downtown Vero, where Greene is a guest artist through the end of April. His vegetal creations, which take the form of whimsical birds, fish, insects and, in one case, a surfer dude, are on exhibit in the gallery’s spacious central room.
Lila Blakeslee, an artist partner at Gallery 14, is one of Greene’s fans.
“We’ve never had an exhibit like this. You can’t walk into that room without smiling,” she says.
Blakeslee met Greene last year when he stopped in at Gallery 14 during a First Friday art stroll. There Greene noticed “Cabana Camel,” a bamboo sculpture by another of the gallery’s partners, Virginia Knapp, that prompted him to ask if Gallery 14 had room for his work, too.
At that time Blakeslee encouraged Greene to submit pieces for the gallery’s upcoming juried exhibition, “Our Beautiful Waters.” When that show opened last December, two of Greene’s works were on display in it. One of them, a bird, sold before the opening reception.
The other artwork, a large dragonfly by the name of “Jasper,” was given a prime spot in the center of the gallery “because we were so excited about it,” Blakeslee enthuses.
The Gallery 14 partners subsequently gave “Jasper” the exhibition’s Gallery 14 Choice Award. The dragonfly was next seen in the Vero Beach Art Club’s two-day “Art on the Island” show in mid-February, where it won that event’s Best Mixed Media award and sold.
Greene’s current exhibition at Gallery 14 came about by happenstance, when the New England-based guest artist who was scheduled for an April show bowed out in mid-February. It didn’t take long for the gallery’s partners to ask Greene to step in as a replacement.
In addition to Greene’s sculpture, Gallery 14 is currently featuring the work of one of its partner members, Viola Pace Knudsen, in another part of the gallery. Blakeslee calls the timing of Greene’s show “fortuitous,” not only because it complements Knudsen’s woven pine needle baskets and nature paintings, but also because it “adds another dimension” to Gallery 14’s offerings.
“We want each show to be different and special for us, because that’s how we build our gallery as a unique, forward-thinking, creative place,” she says.
While Greene is new to the business of art, he has always considered himself a creative person. As a kid he liked to draw, and found inspiration in the grotesque caricatures by California artist (and custom car designer) Ed “Big Daddy” Roth.
“I used to be able to do a nice Rat Fink when I was in junior high,” Greene says.
Born and raised in Tampa, Greene graduated from high school and soon afterward found himself in La Jolla, California, where he made a desultory stab at selling his art. A gallery there displayed a handful of his pen-and-ink “surreal-scape” drawings in a bin, but that’s as far as it went.
He returned to Florida where he married his wife, Mariam, in 1979. The pair soon took off for Lake Tahoe, where Greene worked as a bartender at Harrah’s Casino for over a dozen years. He and Mariam returned to Florida in 1992 with their four sons in tow, and settled in Vero Beach.
After a false start when he worked toward an optician’s certificate, Greene went to Indian River Community College and got a degree in electronics.
“It served me well. I learned how things work, why things work. I can tear anything apart and fix it,” he says.
Prior to March, 2014, when he established Gnu Bamboo and began working for himself, Greene was employed as a copy machine service technician.
He created his first “three or four” sculptures while he was still working at that full-time job.
“I’d come home from work, and I’d go out to the back porch and start working,” he says.
At first he tried to make furniture, but then “something like this little guy happened,” he says, gesturing toward a katydid-like creature whose body is a stubby, twig-studded cylinder of bamboo. It rests on a pedestal next to a diminutive bipedal being with one round eye in the middle of its head.
For Greene, the sticks and stems of which his artworks are composed are not merely materials; they are his collaborative partners in creation. His parts have a say in how they will come together as a whole.
“I don’t have any preconceived idea of what I will make,” says Greene.
“I just start sticking things together and see what it wants to be.”
There are exceptions to the serendipity, like the time, early on, when Greene decided he wanted to make a surfer perched on a length of bamboo (“I didn’t have a board for him to stand on,” Greene says.)
The sculpture, titled “Surfs Zup,” is a mobile, suspended from above by a piece of monofilament. A gentle air current is all it takes to make the surfer bob and weave as though riding a mellow wave.
Greene started to produce self-supporting floor sculptures when he hit upon the idea of making stands out of rebar (steel reinforcing bar), bent into a circle at one end to form a sturdy foot. This Greene decorates with a twining of natural fiber rope to complement the sculpture’s earthy materials. The straight part of the rebar acts as an armature for the bamboo body of the piece, which fits over it like a sleeve.
A table saw came in handy for cutting and shaping the pieces of bamboo that comprise his creatures’ main parts; the fins, feathers and limbs that project from bamboo thoraxes and torsos are pinned to them with knobby pieces of twigs that Greene fits into pre-drilled holes.
“Everything’s pegged. Instantly, it’s done. Then I come back and glue pins,” he says.
Translucent colors are sometimes added to the works with pigments that Greene buys from a local paint store – the same pigments that the store squirts into cans of latex base to fill custom color orders. Greene finishes all of his pieces with a brushing of glossy spar varnish.
A man who often uses the word “exciting” to describe the wonder he feels at his new career as well as for his first feature show in Vero Beach, Greene has high hopes for the immediate future.
“I’ve been told, if this stuff sells, you can bring in more,” he says.
