Brandon Clarke Painting a New Language

Interview by NeFesha Ruth

Atlanta, GA. I was living there for a short period of time. I had just moved from Miami, FL. Brandon would come to my sister and brother-in-law’s church, and I remember his creativity and uniqueness. I kept track of Brandon over the years as he married his beautiful wife and had children. I always knew him as an architect. Then, after the Covid-19 epidemic, which caused the entire world to shut down, I saw Brandon Clarke online with pictures of his art in galleries and at Art Basel in Miami, FL. I never knew him as a visual artists, but I was not surprised when I saw his art embracing gallery walls. Brandon is a graduate of Hampton University with a degree in Architecture and a graduated from Auburn University with a master’s degree in Integrated Design and Construction. His architectural mind has allowed him to methodically imagine his place in the art world and he is building his home to stay.

yourself. Where are you from? You currently live in Miami, right?

Brandon Clarke: So, for me in a nutshell, I'm a coast-to-coast guy. I was born in California. I lived in Delaware, went to college, went to school, got married and then moved down to Miami. I studied architecture and I practice architecture currently. So, you know, I juggle being a father, being a husband, having a career and then having a passion.

How does of all that works?

I'm an architect and I'm an artist. I find it funny that I learned to be an architect, but I was always an artist because my grandma, who was 100 years old, painted, and she was here in Orlando when I was living up north. You know, I would come with her to her house. I would paint with her. She did oils. The cool thing about my grandma was that she would paint her memories. She would paint scenes of where

So, I would paint with her, and I didn't think much of it. I was just having fun with my grandma and that's what it was. But then you know, it switched to architecture, and I was like, “I want to do houses.”

So, I was doing architecture. You know, the professional grind and I had an hour and a half, one way commute to my office. I did that for like eight plus years. So, it would be like three hours of my day that I couldn't claim to do anything.

I'm a byproduct of Covid. I guess I needed something like Covid to kind of swing the pendulum. So, when I gained all that time back, I had more opportunity to do something with my time. However, I didn't channel it until my wife helped me out.

The story is: we're in the house and there's all this turmoil going on in the world. I had a little bit of depression because I was in the house and my home wasn't a sanctuary anymore because it's now where I work and play. So, it was a weird feeling, a lot of injustices that were going on. By the time George Floyd happened, the conversations were swirling around.

“What do you do with Black Children?”

“How do you raise Black Children?”

I have 3 beautiful kids now, 8, 5 and 4. People were just starting to have these real conversations and my wife, and I were having these conversations and we talked about our experiences.

It was really heavy. It was more than I thought because I try to live a little carefree. Not a lot of stress, but there are some things I couldn't avoid. So, I was having trouble sleeping one night and it was around like 2 am in the morning. I was keeping my wife up and she was like, “you need to go do something.” So, I had a blank canvas in the garage, and I just started painting.

It was a time where I didn't understand. Painting was a different type of way of communicating. At that time, I didn't care what it looked like. I didn't care if it was balanced. I didn't care if there was a certain symmetry or if it looked good. I was just putting down how I felt.

This was my first-time taking objects and having them represent something on a surface. I would take my son's notebook and I would just like rip out words or cut out words of like fear and hate, trying to be this love letter you know, if daddy’s generation doesn't understand this, then that’s what he's going to learn? That's what he's going to inherit. And then I would find newspaper clippings like the March on Washington, to stamp the time of what was going on.

When I finished, I was like, “Maybe I have something to say.” From there, I wondered how far I could take this thing. I started getting canvases. I wanted to create an impact, but I didn't know how.

I would surround myself with people who did know. I would go to art fairs. I remember one time, I was talking to this one artist. I just happened to see their work in some window, and they had their contact information. I called them and I kind of felt myself like the Pursuit of Happiness. You know, skip everybody on the list and just go straight to the top. I called the artist and was asking her questions. She said she was not going give me the answers because the journey was my journey and I had to live my journey.

So, from there, I began digging. I began getting all the practical and logistical things together. I started a business, created a website, etc…What really happened to me was something that I didn't expect. It was like the canvas started talking to me. So, when I started painting, the canvas would start asking me questions of like, “What do you want to say?”, “What do you want to do?”, but it also started to tell me, some things that I was scared about in my life. I was really scared to make a mark on the canvas because it felt permanent, and I didn't want to mess up and I fe lt that translated and correlated into my job. In architecture, you have a limit to being wrong because you're dealing with multi-million-dollar projects. I was being fearful. I had to change my definition of what a mistake was. You know I'm a mess. You're a mess, but we make beautiful messes.

I didn't know how to be authentic. So, my opinion started to turn more inward. I started to examine what the actual physical canvases represented. So, I started flipping the canvas on the back and I started working on the back side of the canvas. What I show people in front is maybe a nice suit, charisma, whatever it is. I want to project whatever color or shape and I want to be okay with myself. I really want to love myself. So, who am I on the back?

When I flipped over the canvas, the rules changes. Same thing with the materials, when you paint on the wrong side of something there are different rules. The paint flows differently when you're on the wrong side. You can't control it as much. I started to get all these revelations, while I was painting, of who I am.

My last piece, I had like a shower curtain put over top of the back as a representation, to be vulnerable like when you're naked. It's your most vulnerable state.

However, I learned that when I would create these pieces and then present them, the conversations I had with people from any culture were really deep. They were really rich. I've had people tell me things that were locked up. People would be crying. Art does do that. Everybody's story. My art is healing for me and I find it very cool that other people can kind of grasp that. Honor your Brokenness.

It was called Canvas of the Heart and it was a representation of visual work to get people to understand and name and honor their brokenness and vulnerability, to be authentic. A lot of the canvases were about pulling, tension, ripping, stretching, covering, flipping, rotating, turning...using every surface of the canvas as some reference point to a condition that we all face.

I remember when I hung everything up for the first time, I just sat in the middle of the room and I just took my time because it's my first time seeing everything together. It was my first time being in the space and experiencing it. This body of work was so personal to me. I just had to sit in it, and it was a beautiful moment.

What was the theme of your exhibit and this body of work that you've more recently created?

I tried to make statements that were simple but profound. I was proving to myself that I could create a language and that language is forever. Some of my pieces have color. Some of them are just black and white. The ones that have black and white I chose specifically because I wanted to make it as simple as possible to resemble how we understand truth. The color is a representation of how beautiful we are, the many things inside of us. You'll notice some of them have, shower curtains which is about transparency and authenticity. As artist we are just giving somebody a language to something that they were looking for and that's where the most powerful stuff came in for me.

Brandon Clarke @brandonclarkedesigns