Self Portrait

Sean Brannan

I feel that painting gives me the most expressive medium for exercising the creative process.

My work could be described as Surrealist Expressionism, which is a term I have made up for myself due to the inability to pigeon hole my style of art into any one category or art movement.

Hero’s and influences are varied and far ranging, but if I had to choose a few I would say that Gauguin, Matisse, Miro, and Picasso have played major roles in shaping my style. Also, the Action Painters of the 1940’s such as Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Ashile Gorky, and Francis Bacon have been major influences in my work.

The approach I take to painting is to access the subconscious through the creative process. The creation of an image is to understand oneself by realizing that part of us which is otherwise inaccessible. The imagery I use is found in the shapes, forms, and lines found in our everyday life. Often, I will see an image in the grain of a wooden board or a shadow in a stuccoed ceiling. I become like a child who looks at the clouds and points out odd characters and strange images. Often, my images are initiated as a single line drawing. The line meanders and snakes along in an indeterminable, overlapping sequence that creates shapes, which ultimately reveal themselves as animals, people, faces, or symbols.
The subjects in my paintings typically portray the human condition and I try to interpret this condition with representational color and forms that convey strong emotion and symbolism. One of the goals I try to achieve is to flatten the image so that the viewer is forced to confront the paint itself. In this way the paint and the color become just as important as the image.

If there is one truth to art it is that it is completely subjective to the individual.
Regardless of the meaning that I discover for my own work, it is always my hope that the viewer will make his or her own interpretation of what they see.

Sean Brannan received a BA in graphic design from Plymouth State University in 1994.

He currently resides in San Diego, CA.

He can be contacted through this site for current or commissioned works.