PUNCHMAGAZINE.COM 75 lupine, poppies, butterflies and deer. Bruce generously employs rich colors to illuminate the trails, flora and fauna from every season in a single composition. “This is a key location for me on the Peninsula,” confides Bruce. “My routine was to come home from work and go running in Edgewood Park.” Coastal sites that capture Bruce’s imagination include Pigeon Point Lighthouse in Pescadero and a 19th-century stagecoach stop in San Gregorio that, according to oral history, served as a roadhouse and music venue in the 1930s and ‘40s. “It captivates me,” he says. “I am drawn to structures that might deserve some more recognition.” Bruce also paints scenes from Big Basin National Park, Stage Road near Pescadero and Red’s Coffee House in San Francisco, to name a few. “I want to honor the places that are significant to all of us who live here and to the people who inhabited these places before,” he says. As a student at UCLA, Bruce majored in atmospheric physics. But his artistic side prevailed over the sciences and he transferred to Humboldt State University, where he earned a fine arts degree with an emphasis in painting. “I realized I had to give the arts a serious try and see how far I could go with it,” he says. From Humboldt’s instructors, who were often working artists, he learned the lifestyle compromises he would need to make as a painter and pivoted to a career in library systems and then technology. “As a software engineer, you have all kinds of tools to measure your work, and they are mostly objective,” he reasons. “With painting, a lot of the reaction is subjective or emotional and depends on the chord you strike with the viewer.” Now retired from his technology career, painting is Bruce’s full-time occupation. Though he previously worked with oil paints, currently he exclusively uses watercolor, occasionally adding details in pen and ink. The medium opened up for him when he encountered an
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