Museum to feature Broer artwork

Ever since he can remember Roger Broer has been an artist.
“As a young kid I always drew,” he said. He liked to make things like little tools as well.
Growing up in a tiny town in Nebraska, his artistic nature wasn’t  necessarily encouraged by his family.
But his neighbor Joe, a retired farmer, helped forge his talents.
“I loved Joe. He was a good guy,” recalls Broer, who describes his neighbor as curious, well read and encouraging. “I’d go out the back door and sit over and visit with Joe. He always had paper. And he always had pencils. He’d say, ‘OK draw me,’ and he’d pose.”
Broer would quickly sketch Joe.
“And he’d say, ‘That's pretty good. It’s better than it was last week. Why don’t you try this?’”
Joe would make suggestions, asking Broer to change the size of his nose or notice the way the light  was coming from.
“He made me aware of things. He was giving me art instruction and he didn’t even know it,” Broer said.
Broer didn’t take art formally  in school at the time. But he estimates he did hundreds of drawings of Joe, six to eight a night, unsure what became of them, save the encouragement to pursue his abilities, which lingers to this day.
As a way to earn a living, Broer began a career as a counselor for the State of Washington, a job he took while in graduate school and pursued after his education  ended.
“I would be dead right now if I’d stayed with that. It was very emotionally challenging,” he said.
Yet he stayed at that job until a show in Paris put him on a new trajectory. The show was with  designer Pierre Cardin.
“That kind of was the frosting on the cake. This is what I’m supposed to be doing,” he said.
For many years Roger’s wife, Merlene, would support the family with income from her teaching career allowing him to pursue a living while following his passion.
Broer has created a lifetime of art out of a form known as monoprint or monotype.
Monoprint is a recognized printing procedure or process. But it requires the use of printers, inks, a printing press and solvents in its traditional form.
“I didn’t like the smell of the printing ink,” Broer said, making a sour face. “It’s sticky and gooey. It’s just not fluid for me.”
Yet he worked with a master printmaker who encouraged Broer to try it.
“I got home and did six pieces the first day because it was just natural for me,” he said.
He began to play with oil on plexiglass, developing a different way to do the same thing.
The results are astounding, although not immediate at first. Broer explains that it took years of developing this process, which can now get him immediate results. He is now considered  a master at hand-burnished monotype print making. It’s a medium that plays into his personality, especially as he ages.
Broer is brutally honest about his work and his creations.
“I don’t expect people  to like my art. I don’t expect everybody to love what I do. Because what I do requires a certain amount of sophistication. It requires a certain amount of background. I guess the word is esoteric,” he says as a means to describe his art.
The description captures the essence of his numerous pieces  which can be described in myriad manners from dark to macabre, joyful to perplexing, real to thoughtful.
Regardless of the adjective used to describe his pieces, each elicits emotion.
“I don’t try to do pretty. I try to do something my audience has to respond with, has to interact with,” he said.
Broer feels good art should appeal to one or more senses, including what he refers to as the rhythm in one’s head. He considers this a lot when he is creating.
“What’s the tempo in this piece?” he asks himself.
His philosophy has been to create a piece “that they’re going to interact with. It has something in there or they find something in this piece that’s going to make them warm or cold or upset or happy or some emotion.”
Broer tries to appeal to the people he connects with. He doesn't follow trends and fads. He doesn’t make his art to sell en masse.
“You put what you have out there. You’re making yourself very vulnerable to criticism,” he said. “And that’s fine. Even those people are connecting in some way.”
His art gets people to think. To arrive at their own truth.
Broer is an artist for the sake of art.
“I’m in this because I need to make art. I’ll never stop that,” he said. “People always ask me, ‘are you ever going to retire?’ Well what would I retire from? I’m already doing what I want to do.”
Broer is in his studio daily for eight hours.
Sometimes it’s not obvious what he is working on, but he is always observing.
“You’re looking at things all the time. I look at things differently than most people do probably. I see more than what’s on the surface,” he said.
As if to support this fact Broer gets up quickly to show a piece he created.
“One day I was sitting over here in my chair and looked into the other room,” he said. From that specific vantage point one can barely make out a buffalo skull and the tip of a horn. “But I saw this bear. That was just a sketch I made at that time.”
Broer’s work can be seen online or by attending one of his shows. He estimates he does 50-100 shows a year with his next one in Santa Fe, N.M.
The Brinton Museum in Big Horn, Wyo., will display some of Broer’s pieces in an exhibit entitled “The Last of the Lakota Dream Catchers.”
The exhibit runs from Sept. 2 to Oct. 30.
Broer will give an artist talk at the museum Sept. 8.