Rich Shapero
Rich Shapero (SHAP-er-oh), creator of Wild Animus, was born in 1948 in Los Angeles. In 1965, Rich started college at Berkeley. He majored in English lit, finding heroes both within his coursework and outside—William Blake, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Arthur Machen, Walter Pater and Henri Bergson. “All of those writers were important to me because they saw our everyday world as a veil, behind which a world more profound, more alive, and more real, was waiting to be discovered.” And music played a role. For all of these writers, the rhythm and melody of language gave it “the power to transport us into the emotional domain of an unseen world.”
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Eugene Von Bruenchenhein
Rich’s passion for the work of Visionary artist Eugene Von Bruenchenhein motivated him to seek out and publicly display the best of the artist’s paintings from 1954-1963 at vonbruenchenhein.com.
“I first saw Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s paintings in 2003. I found them mysterious and evocative, and full of energy. The more I looked at them, the more they expanded beyond the borders of the frame. They seemed to carry with them a complex history, as if they were glimpses of a world distant from our own. Many appeared to depict an event—on land, underwater, or in deep space—drawn from some alien cosmogony. The paintings were relatively inexpensive, so I purchased a few. A couple of years later, I purchased a few more. And a few more. I loved the places they took me and the power they had to stimulate my imagination. Finally, my enthusiasm for the paintings reached the point that I wanted to share them. So, in May, 2009, we launched vonbruenchenhein.com.”