This Land

Brainard admits that he never works with a definitive plan in mind. In this case, for example, he took digital photos of a dumpster covered in rust to serve as the basic canvas.

Brainard’s next step in the process combines the two panels depicting the rust-covered dumpster into a single, unified base for his work.

He then prints the chosen photographs on heavyweight watercolor paper, mounts them on aluminum sheets and seals them with an acrylic medium to render them waterproof.

Next, he decides whether his painting will work with the patterns in the photograph or against them to create a kind of artistic friction. For this piece, Brainard chose to keep most of the photographs intact.

Brainard looked to his surroundings to provide the soft, round shapes in this painting. Specifically, he was inspired by very traditional Parisian railings and balconies.

After this touch-and-go process, Brainard’s work is complete. He’s ready to title it. He names the work “In Honfleur” after the region in which he photographed the dumpster doors, and the piece is 5’3” wide by 3’6” tall.

Brainard then collects materials to complete the collage. He seeks out different materials to incorporate into the piece, finding them along the sides of roads and sometimes in dumpsters.

After Brainard collects all the potential elements for his piece, he creates the collage through an improvisational “back-and-forth process, of fitting in the collage elements and painting to develop the work as a whole.”