Frame of Mind

I have over forty years experience as an exhibiting artist. My primary reputation is as a video artist working in single channel videotapes and video installation. My core values are that of a painter. I turned to video in the 1970’s to look at the world using time and the video camera as a window into the world I was experiencing. Throughout the 1970’s- 1990’s I worked in collaboration with artist, Connie Coleman. We were artist –in-residence at the Experimental Tv Center for 13 years. Connie Coleman past away in 2011, the collaboration continues as I rework any artwork that was started under the Coleman/Powell collaboration and not signed off as finished. This includes raw video and unfinished prints.

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Starting in 2001, I began mixing digital photography, web works, and traditional art media with my video work. Digital devices, video cameras , DSLR’s ,iPads, go-pro like cameras and cell phones have replaced the sketch book as my means of gathering information about the world. Digital photography has become the center point in the practice branching out into print making, archival inkjets, video animation, web work, and even painting.

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I have a long relationship with the forest and nature. As a child I spent my summers on my grandfather’s tree farm and as a teenage I learned wilderness survival in Canada. I have always struggled with the relationship between art and nature. I think it is important that as an artist, I develop work about nature that goes beyond its physical beauty. Electronic technology has allowed me to develop ways of looking and experiencing the natural world using time, sound, and motion as the other qualities that define a natural space. I have also started to use the technologies of 3-D imaging and modeling as a way of documenting those experiences. When I go into the forest or into a wetland. I use many sorts of electronic tools to document my experience. Each type of camera, lenses, and microphones record the environment in different ways. I use image and sound processing to enhance and personalize the documented experience. My video tapes no longer function as experimental narratives but electronic paintings that change over time. The work is now exhibited in galleries on looping media players on flat screens or projectors but also on instagram and Vimeo replacing the broadcast model.

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My work has always been connected to social process and human experience. My undergraduate education was classic modernism and formalism . In hindsight I drifted into both photography and video because the narrative was still very much alive in these media. My graduate work focused on Marxism, Post Marxism and Post Structuralism and the construct of reality and values as it meshed in electronic media and its influence in defining our reality. The artwork from 1983 - 2020 always was constructed through a political lens. This culminated with the “Trump Dump” a four year investigation into the madness of not only Trump but also within the American culture both embracing it and trying erase it like it did’t exist. The Trump Dump was both aggressively censored and praised.

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Since moving to the Catskills in 2013, I have rediscovered that intense involvement I had with nature as a child. In the Catskill community I have found a rich mix of different kinds of people and a rich cultural and artistic heritage. I have allowed the last thirteen years to be an open ended exploration and conversation with my art making processes and materials.

Robert Brune is a documentary and landscape photographer whose work explores the intersection of social narrative and the natural world.

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Beginning his career in 2004, Brune spent over a decade as an investigative photojournalist covering global social justice movements. His frontline imagery and video reporting have been featured by CNN, MSNBC, and Frontline PBS.

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In 2016, Brune transitioned from the volatility of protest movements to the intentional stillness of nature and street photography. Now based in Delaware County, he serves as a prominent chronicler of the region’s creative landscape. In March 2026, he co-founded a dedicated digital platform for Catskills arts and culture, continuing his lifelong commitment to storytelling through the lens and journalism.