It was a professional boon for an aspiring artist. But Bransby leveraged it personally as well, in courting a fellow artist named Mary Ann Hemmie.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would borrow the family car to take her for a ride \u2014 students didn\u2019t have cars there,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I would take her day-old flowers, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eighty years later, at age 100, Eric Bransby is still painting, which testifies to an inextinguishable passion for his art. But it also speaks to a relentless resourcefulness that usually wins out.<\/p>\n
It did with Mary Ann, who accepted those flowers and, before long, his marriage proposal. It did in the art world, too, where Bransby\u2019s ability to see possibility in blank walls has made him one of America\u2019s most renowned mural painters.<\/p>\n
Bransby is fascinated by the human form. He traces this back to high school, where a marionette show inspired him and a friend to build their own little theater. With a comic\u2019s timing, he quips, \u201cWe were high school kids, and we were playing with dolls.\u201d<\/p>\n
His interest intensified when he studied in Kansas City under Thomas Hart Benton, an accomplished muralist and a leader of the Regionalist movement. In 1942, Bransby painted his first mural, a Works Progress Administration project for a local high school.<\/span><\/p>\n Upon being drafted into World War II, Bransby was posted at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He drew maps and charts, and created visuals for officers\u2019 presentations. But he also talked his way into creating a set of murals on the post\u2019s history. And at night, he painted figures by the dim light of the latrine.<\/p>\n It was 1945 when he, Mary Ann, and their daughter, Fredericka \u201965, came to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center so Bransby could study under illustrator and artist Boardman Robinson. With the FAC serving as CC\u2019s de facto arts department, it wasn\u2019t long before his transcript \u2014 which included old credits from a small Iowa college \u2014 came across the desk of CC Director of Fine Arts Carol Truax.<\/p>\n \u201cShe said, \u2018With this background in the liberal arts, we can give you a B.A. in one year. Moreover, because of six years of professional art training, we can give you an M.A.,\u2019\u201d Bransby remembers. \u201cAnd I said, \u2018Well, as long as they\u2019re handing them out, I might as well take them.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n For his master\u2019s thesis, Bransby told Robinson\u2019s successor, Jean Charlot, that he wanted to paint the rotunda of <\/span>Cossitt Hall \u2014 a rounded, 600-square-foot \u201ccanvas\u201d that arched as high as 27 feet off the ground, pictured at right. As put by The Tiger student newspaper, \u201cThe murals to be painted in secco, include scenes or [of] Indians and whites bartering, the Gold Rush days and the Cattle Industry in this state.\u201d Reflective of Benton\u2019s exaggerated figure-drawing style, and also of Charlot\u2019s insistence that a mural tie into the building architecture, \u201cSettlement of the West\u201d earned Bransby his master\u2019s.<\/p>\n After CC, possibilities abounded. Bransby and his wife even considered going to Frank Lloyd Wright\u2019s Taliesin West school in Arizona. (They met the famous architect there; upon reviewing some of his expressionistic lithographs, Bransby remembers, Wright advised, \u201cGet happy, young man.\u201d)<\/p>\n Over the next decade, Bransby turned down a fellowship opportunity in Rome and an invitation from Charlot to join his team at the University of Hawaii. Instead, he worked a day job, as an illustrator at the Air Force Academy. Fredericka remembers that although it wasn\u2019t her dad\u2019s dream job, he never phoned it in.<\/p>\n \u201cHe feels it is so repugnant to not have the integrity of your passions,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n While at the AFA, Bransby captured the energy of the space race in The History of Navigation, an eight-panel mural series. He took on other murals wherever he could find them. At night, he would sharpen his figure skills by attending life-drawing groups.<\/p>\n So as Fredericka matriculated to CC, Bransby was well equipped to return to the classroom. From the mid-\u201960s to the mid-\u201980s, he taught at Western Illinois University and then the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Upon leaving both, he left murals in his wake.<\/p>\n Bransby and his wife returned to Colorado Springs in 1985. In \u201986, he repainted Boardman Robinson\u2019s original Fine Arts Center mural for the institution\u2019s 50th anniversary. He returned for the 75th anniversary to paint a new one, aptly titled \u201cResilience.\u201d In between, he restored the Cossitt Hall rotunda and Shove Chapel\u2019s ceiling mural, and created the 10-foot-by-75-foot \u201cHistory of the Pikes Peak Region\u201d at the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum.<\/p>\n Steve Wood \u201984 worked closely with Bransby at the Pioneers Museum and at Shove. Asked about Bransby\u2019s style, he references a kind of \u201csemi-cubist approach,\u201d influenced both by Benton and Albers. \u201cBut then there is his style as a human \u2014 just warm, generous, intelligent, embracing.\u201d<\/p>\n Says Thomas, \u201cIt really helped me know where my own convictions should lie when I set out on an ambitious painting project.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, Bransby continues to teach, holding Saturday drawing sessions on the same property he and Mary Ann bought 70 years ago. On the wall of his studio, alongside a drawing for his 1945 FAC mural, is his 1999 Louis T. Benezet Award from CC, for lifetime achievement.<\/p>\n Recent years have brought other honors: a citation in the Congressional Record, lifetime achievement awards, solo and group exhibitions. In October, he was to have been f\u00eated for his 100th birthday with a premiere showing of \u201cA Last Mural,\u201d Jay Kriss\u2019 documentary about Bransby\u2019s life; when Kriss unexpectedly died, the FAC hosted a smaller gathering instead.<\/p>\n![\"cc-bul-winter16-23-bransbyside\"](\"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/files\/2016\/12\/CC-BUL-WINTER16-23-BransbySide.jpg\")
<\/a>Bransby flourished while at CC. He and Mary Ann bought property south of town and, with the help of her father, constructed a small house. He painted murals at the FAC, the old St. Francis Hospital, Cheyenne Mountain Country Club, and elsewhere. He would still sit in a corner to draw, but not from dead bodies \u2014 now his subjects were the graceful students of Hanya Holm, the influential choreographer and longtime CC instructor of dance.<\/p>\n<\/a>But the \u201950s brought major challenges. A tsunami of abstract expressionism endangered Bransby\u2019s beloved figurative art; acknowledging the changing times, he started a Yale University M.F.A. program under Josef Albers. Then money got tight. He took a tenure-track teaching position at the University of Illinois, contingent on him completing his Yale thesis. He did<\/span> that \u2014 creating a fresco-relief mural for a mechanical engineering building at UI \u2014 but the damp weather there intensified Fredericka\u2019s asthma, and doctors ordered the family west. So back they came to Colorado Springs.<\/p>\n<\/a>Mural painter Trevor Thomas \u201910 had his own apprenticeship with Bransby, during the making of \u201cResilience.\u201d When Bransby was dealing with Mary Ann\u2019s decline and 2011 death, Thomas took over part of the project. He remembers Bransby leaving him with a directive to paint not for the FAC\u2019s leaders or even its visitors, but for the \u201cjanitors, docents, people who have to literally live with these murals.\u201d<\/p>\n