BRIAN SANDERS

BIO

Based in Pacific Grove, Brian takes the everyday scenes of life and paints the beauty of the mundane. Looking for the interesting story inside the unnoticed buildings, sunny skies belying the melancholy underneath.

ARTIST STATEMENT

When I was a kid in the 1970s, my dad gave me a camera, and I wandered around taking photos of things I found interesting. These images encouraged me to look deeper and take my photography to the next level. Influenced by Photorealism in the early 1990s, I started making paintings of my photos.

While successful, those early works (I gave them as gifts to friends and family and even sold a few) were put on hold while work and family took priority. In the early 2000s, I rediscovered my passion and began painting again. 

I have come to see my paintings as documents of things looked at but not seen, the ordinary that are, upon further examination, actually beautiful.  

My subject matter comes from photographs I have taken over the past 40 years. They reflect suburban California neighborhoods, busy New York City streets, European villages, and dusty Mexican towns, with the common theme of being banal yet beautiful.