Robert Brune is a journalist, editor, and photographer whose career spans more than a decade of reporting on politics, public policy, and social justice movements in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. His work has focused on giving voice to underrepresented communities and documenting the issues shaping public life.

Since relocating to upstate New York seven years ago, Brune has turned his attention to the region’s vibrant arts and cultural landscape. As Chief Editor of Arts & Culture for the Mountain Eagle, he helped transform the newspaper’s approach to arts coverage, moving beyond traditional press-release reporting to produce in-depth artist profiles, exhibition reviews, and feature stories that highlight the people and ideas driving the creative community.

In addition to his journalism, Brune is known for his nature photography, capturing the landscapes, wildlife, and seasonal beauty of upstate New York. Through both his writing and photography, he seeks to connect audiences with the stories, artists, and environments that shape the region.

Through The Upstate Vibe, Brune and his team are expanding the coverage of arts and culture beyond the newspaper’s traditional footprint, exploring creative communities, exhibitions, and cultural trends throughout New York and beyond.

Moving to the Catskills in 2013, I rediscovered the profound connection I had with the forest and nature early in life. My work regularly incorporates material from the surrounding terrains, from lithographs of dried leaves or mushrooms and installations caked in mud and residue to provide a faithfully tactile component.

I think it is important that as an artist, I develop work about nature that goes beyond its physical beauty, and shows a deep attentiveness to the balance between human presence and the natural world. I have also started to use the technologies of 3-D imaging and modeling as a way of documenting the forest or a wetland. Electronic technology has allowed me ways of defining a natural space using time, sound, and motion.

My videotapes 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. It has branched off into a series, inspired by the tradition of the iconic San Franciscan “Painted Ladies” houses, where I exhibit my videos on the exterior of my house. The white siding is a blank canvas, a video projector offering life-sized scale, and the street address serves as a site for community-based art.

Today my work is mostly retrospective, simply looking, using image and sound processing to enhance and personalize a documented experience, and the camera lens as a window to the world around us. I want to communicate with the viewer, to recreate an experience and show them the way I am seeing something. My body of work is distinguished by collaboration and creative partnerships, some spanning thirty plus years, because experiences that I cannot personally have, I can come to understand through their writing or composing, and can translate it visually. It allows me to exceed the boundaries of my own perspective and awareness.

It’s important that my art be didactic, that a person who spends time standing in front of a piece or within an installation leaves with a new understanding, big or small.

Decades of learning and teaching humanist and post-modern philosophies amplified the political voice behind each piece of work. My graduate work focused on Marxism, Post Marxism and Post Structuralism and the construct of reality as it meshed in electronic media and defining our reality and existence on Earth.

My process is playful, organic; almost a calligrapher’s zen flow state—putting my vision on the end of a brush, the paper and ink become pieces of technology, and the result is the residue of that moment of creation. I have allowed the last 13 years to be an open-ended exploration and conversation with my materials and emerging technology.