Meet Cay Broendum and his horological art work

August 24, 2016

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Horological Art

What happens when an artist also is a watch enthusiast? He or she hopefully creates some horological art! We have our own artist on-board, by the name of Teun van Heerebeek, who surprises you with his recurring Watches & Pencils articles here on Fratello. People – including us – love this stuff and some of you even contacted us to have it on print (which can be done so via this link). However, there are more horological artists around. Meet Cay Broendum.

Cay Broendum

You might recognize his name from his Rolex and Omega artwork that is shown on his own website(s), or from his interview with Hodinkee in 2013. We thought it would be interesting to talk to him once more. His artwork, that covers the much loved Speedmaster Professional amongst our readers (and ourselves) as well as some interesting Rolex sports models.

An Introduction

Cay Broendum is an independent artist since 1991, with no gallery obligations. He is able to use his creativity and painting skills in any direction he likes. You will find a wide variety of art work on his website. Not only watches.

Broendum loves to go by the expression “If you do something you like, you do it well.”. As Cay adds “I believe you can see in my artwork, that I actually like those watches that I paint.”.

Why watches?

Besides being an artist, Cay loves anything mechanical. Be it vintage motorcycles or cars. After a long time using these machines, he decided to adapt a bit better to his city surroundings with just little space and lots of traffic. He bought and start using a bicycle.Besides that. He also decided to stop using his mobile phone as a watch and bought himself a mechanical watch. Something that he could enjoy every single day. Cay Broendum loves a lot of different styles when it comes to watches, but for him, the sports watches from the 1960s and 1970s work best. He uses them as daily beaters.

Tell us about the process of doing an art piece

“Most of my artworks are created when I´m in “the zone” with a watch. It can be a new watch but I don’t need to own it myself. It can be a watch a friend just got, a color on a NATO-strap that just works with the inlay on a sunny day, or a watch I see somewhere online. It just have to make me go “Wow Yes”.”

“At the moment Tropical brown dials does it for me – but it´s also summertime in Copenhagen. That properly explains why..[haha]”

This fall, Cay Broendum will also work on series of limited pieces on request by watch enthusiasts. Some of the larger poster size works will be available for those large empty walls in your home or office.

He adds: “Most of the time when a artwork is ready, I go “THAT one I´m gonna keep! ” But then someone comes and tells me “Cay, you have to sell that one to me, because your are the one that can make a new one, we can’t…” And there we go. Actually, the thing that drives me to paint all these watches is that you – the watch collector – like them and putting them on your wall.

These watches I paint reminds us of good times, stories and makes us think and retell stories about the Past – Present and future.”