Brandon Boyd’s work as a singer, songwriter, both as a solo artist and with his platinum-selling rock band, is well documented and universally acclaimed. But now his other life’s work -- that of a painter -- has been garnering increasing attention and devoted audiences of its own.
In his painting and drawings, Boyd reveals a personal, freeform, ambiguous kind of visual style that focuses on magic, serendipity, curiosity and mystery. Describing his art-making process as a kind of “blissful, familiar trance,” Boyd’s works carry both the evidence of the beautiful chaos and the power of revealing the narratives inside of it. His images are constructed by chance through colorful ink spills and the contents of his own travel journals. As songs might come to him in a dream, so he discovers the vibrant, witty, eccentrically classical constellations of shape and circumstance that hide in plain view or emerge from his own quieted mind through another kind of sight.
Boyd has published three books of his visual art: White Fluffy Clouds (2003), From the Murks of the Sultry Abyss (2007), and So the Echo (2013). Among dozens of book signings, group and solo exhibitions, special collaborative projects, and engaged philanthropic arts, Boyd has shown his crisp, expressive paintings, prints, and drawings at cities across the globe in group and solo exhibitions. This includes a collaboration with Tom’s Shoes at Undefeated in Los Angeles, Juxtapoz Magazine’s Anniversary Group Exhibition; special projects at LACMA; Artists for Haiti at Track 16 Gallery; a solo exhibition and mural at Hurley’s )( Space; and participated in gallery exhibitions from West Hollywood to Cologne, San Francisco to Rome -- at Skotia Gallery, C.A.V.E. Gallery, Gallery 446, Soze Gallery, Arty Farty, Ono de Arte, and Rossmut Gallery. He has been featured at special projects in Zurich’s GRAFIK 14, the wildly popular ‘Flows to Bay’ exhibition at the Museum of Monterey and Scope Art Fair as part of 2015 Miami Art Basel. In 2016 he held a solo exhibit at Andenken Gallery in Amsterdam, participated in group shows at Parlor Gallery, The Irvine Arts Complex, Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas and most recently at POP Austin Art Fair in October.
Boyd was a natural artist from childhood, and in fact his dream to attend art school after college once sat within his grasp, scholarships and all. He ended up signing a record deal instead. Through the next 25 whirlwind years, he never stopped painting and drawing, coming to view the creative processes of musicianship and visual artistry as both complementary and intertwined. “The music is intellectual,” Boyd says. “It tickles and frustrates me; it’s untouchable and fascinating. The art is intuitive, more like just breathing. It’s just a part of me.”
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