Rich Shapero
Rich Shapero (SHAP-er-oh), creator of the Wild Animus storytelling experience, 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
Born in Wisconsin in 1910, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein married a local girl and worked in a bakery during the ten years that he completed his most imaginative pieces. Most of his paintings were completed in a single frenzied session, one to three hours in length. His neighbors regarded him as a weird character. EVB saw himself as a great artist, but was unsuccessful in selling his work or gaining any recognition. By his own accounting, he completed 1,080 paintings. When he died, his small house was crammed from floor to ceiling with them.
“I first saw Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s paintings in 2003. I found them mysterious and evocative, and full of energy” says Rich Shapero, the collector who is bringing EVB’s online collection of paintings to life. “The more I looked at them, the more they expanded beyond the borders of the frame . . . the paintings completed during 1954-1963 are extraordinary.”