A living at art.

Byline: Bob Keefer The Register-Guard

Ken Brauner is an unlikely professional artist. He knows about green chains and head rigs as much as he knows composition and color theory. A veteran of World War II, he came home to Oregon and worked in the timber industry for 30 years.

Then, with two kids in college, he quit to become a full-time painter.

Now 83, Brauner paints scenes of logging - from a generation ago, before men with chainsaws had been replaced in the woods by feller-buncher machines.

Born in Corvallis, Brauner started drawing and painting when he was a kid. When he was 11, his grandmother gave him a set of oil paints. When he was 16, he painted a picture of the kneeling Jesus. The painting hangs in his Eugene studio today.

His only formal art training came at the University of Oregon, where he was a student for a couple of years after getting out of the Army infantry, which had sent him to the Philippines.

He was in a figure drawing class one day at the UO when, struck by the absurdity of a bunch of people standing around drawing pictures of a naked man, Brauner knocked off a slightly ribald cartoon of the model.

His teacher didn't approve. "Why don't you go down to Disney?" the teacher grumbled. "That's where they need cartoonists."

Brauner switched his major to physical education.

In any case, he didn't finish college. He started working in the timber industry, where he held just about every job you can imagine, from pulling a green chain to managing sales.

He married and had two children. In his free time he kept drawing and painting, doing a nice side business creating Christmas cards for his employers.

In 1976 his mill shut down, and - with two sons in college - Brauner decided it was time to become a full-time artist.

"I thought, all I have to do is sell two paintings a month to match my take-home pay," he says. "I just started painting."

The couple struggled at first, but not desperately. Brauner already had good contacts in the timber industry who were interested in his work.

Today Brauner and his wife are a well oiled machine. Ken paints upstairs, and Phyllis handles marketing and sales from a shipping room downstairs in a converted garage.

He turns out about half a dozen oil paintings a year. In that time, she sends out two direct-mail brochures to 9,500 names on the mailing list she's developed over three decades. While he sells some work through galleries, Brauner basically markets himself.

"Most of our stuff is Christmas cards and prints," Phyllis Brauner says. "There isn't a big push to sell the paintings, because we don't really have to rely on someone buying the paintings."

About five years ago she created a Web site (www .kenbrauner.com) through which she sells his cards, calendars and prints.

Brauner creates clear, crisp, realistic paintings that ordinary people enjoy.

One of the keys to his success, he says, is understanding contrast. Without the right structure of light and dark, a painting becomes unreadable.

"Many artists really miss that," he says.

Perhaps his best known painting is "Day's End," which shows three loggers walking side by side out of the woods after a long day's work.

"It's just typical of loggers," Brauner says. "I ran across an old photo that showed three guys coming out of the woods. I mimicked those guys and changed the background quite a bit. I don't know how many people have called me and said, `The guy on the right is my granddad,' or `The guy in the middle is my dad.' '

"Day's End" is on the cover of a book of his work, "Scenes From Timber Country,'' that the couple published. The book is available through the Web site for $54.

KEN BRAUNER

Eugene painter

Age: 83

His subject: Working in the woods

Style: Realist 

See his work: www.kenbrauner .com

Two of Eugene's older artists seldom show in galleries here. Painters Ken Brauner and Norma Driscoll, who have both worked here for decades, are very different artists. Brauner, 83, paints genre scenes of logging in the Northwest woods. Driscoll, who is 79, paints in the fashion of Pablo Picasso and Paul Cezanne. They do share two things in common: Both have spent years marketing their own work, and both have a fierce devotion to painting.