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To draw a line is to make a decision. It is to say: this exists. This matters. Look here.

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Paul Briskey has spent a career asking what a line can do — and the answer has changed depending on where he was standing. Trained at the University of Wisconsin–Madison across painting and multiple disciplines, it was a decade living and working in Kuwait that shifted his practice decisively toward line. Partly it was the landscapes and light of the Middle East. Partly it was simpler than that: a sketchbook travels. Line became his primary language because it could go where he went.

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That discovery runs through every period of work gathered here. During a period of personal turmoil — a divorce, a relocation from New Jersey back to Madison — Briskey made a series of intimate non-objective works on paper in which autobiographical lines were gradually buried under accumulating marks, the original self dissolving into visual noise. It is a quietly radical idea: that meaning can be obscured as deliberately as it is revealed. That a line is never merely description. That it is identity.

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In his most recent work something shifts. A second line appears — laid deliberately over the first, not to obscure but to insist. To say again, more clearly: this one. And what that line is describing, more often than not, is something we already know. A building. A streetscape. A monument. The kinds of structures that become invisible through familiarity, that we stop actually seeing because we have filed them away. Briskey, the perpetual traveler who learned to look at the world from the outside, turns that same fresh attention homeward. His Waunakee, his Madison, his streets — rendered with the eyes of someone who knows that the familiar is worth the same fierce looking as the foreign.

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These are portraits of place. And like all good portraits, they ask you to look again at something you thought you already knew.

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Briskey is represented by Milward Farrell Fine Art in Madison, maintains an active local exhibition presence, and his work can be found in private collections throughout the region and beyond. Select works are available for purchase. Inquiries welcome.

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A percentage of all sales benefits Peace Lutheran Church and Create Waunakee, Inc.

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