About Ralph Michael Brekan
Ralph Michael Brekan started oil painting at age 12. While attending high school in Arizona, Ralph accompanied a class field trip to the Phoenix Art Museum where he was introduced to the works of Wallace Berman, David Hockney and other artists in California Assemblage movement. From that encounter, Brekan shifted focus from traditional studio art, to the free-form discipline of assemblage. Taking a radical approach to David Hockney's photo-collage technique, Brekan earned university-level credits, before exiting high school, with his early xerox collage pieces. Brekan was accepted at Parsons, Columbia College and Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, but his parents, misguided about the value of art school education, refused to support his academic and creative goals. Undaunted, Brekan accepted an art scholarship to attend a regional community college scholarship and began contributing visual art and multimedia to the Phoenix gallery scene, as well as, creating visuals for raves and the art-party culture in the late 1990's. Pursuing a change in lifestyle, and the romantic possibility of work on movies abroad, Brekan briefly retreated to the Czech Republic (c. 1995-1996.) While in Prague, he mingled with expatriates, photographed the landscapes and contributed short stories to the English speaking literary magazine Optimism" (c.1996). Brekan returned to downtown Phoenix the Spring of 1996 and further developed a series of works based on the photographs of Prague. These works unveiled at the Swirling Daze: Multimedia Arts Extravaganza at the Alwun House in downtown Phoenix (c.1997). The show's success spawned four consecutive annual exhibitions