@patrickkanemcgregor

I was born in Denver, Colorado, in 1971. I started drawing when I was around 3 or 4 years old. The earliest drawing I remember was figuring out how to draw a simple flower... a circle, then the pedals around it. I started seeing my first comic books around 6 and became obsessed with making my own books or coloring in ones that my parents bought me. The Frank Frazetta book covers and Conan the Barbarian were my favorites as I got older, dealing mostly with anatomy and figurative art. At this time I was strictly sketching or pen and ink. At the age of 18, I got a job as the store artist of a Tower records in the Bay Area where I had moved 3 years prior in 1985. I was introduced to graffiti by a co-worker that I shared the art room with. He did the video stuff and I was the records. I’d watch him draw these letters and characters, I was instantly hooked. He would take me out and we’d paint some over pass, or a legal spot, then trains eventually. He was a big influence and inspiration. A few years later in 1992, my son entered the world and I had to get a real job. So my new family moved to Portland, Oregon looking for cheaper housing and a better life. I painted graffiti with my friends I had met there pretty hard for a few years and I worked at various vinyl sign shops or painting houses when I finally found my dream job. I saw a guy hanging off of a building on a swing stage, painting an ad. I decided then and there that’s what I wanted to do, it was like corporate graffiti and I get paid. After hounding the owner of the business to hire me, they finally gave me a job apprenticing and cleaning brushes for my first technical art teacher. Up until then I had never painted with a brush (and haven’t stopped since.) I was introduced to color theory and anatomy with oil colors, and eventually learned how to manipulate these colors into realistic images using a classical approach and technique. The whole job consisted of getting an image from an advertising agency and figuring out the best way to paint this image on the side of a 2 to sometimes 12 story building and execute the project smoothly with a deadline looming. I think the graffiti mentality came in handy with being fast and efficient for this job. I got better with every painting and followed this work to New York for 6 years and worked with some great artists along the way, always and still learning. I still paint billboards to this day but not full time. I even catch a piece here and there with some spray paint but tend to stick to my brushes and rollers. Since moving back home to Denver in 2012, I’ve been working on being a full time artist. Now with the art I produce today, I try to incorporate all of these styles in my paintings. I tend to lean towards portraits and I like to use powerful images. To paint them as big as possible in a quick fashion. Which is why I tend to paint my bulldog “Boug” in my murals, I like to use my own reference photos and I have so many good pictures of him, he’s a good muse, even in his afterlife. Now I can draw a photo on to a wall and paint it very quickly with my only tools being a level, brushes and paint.

@opalkastudios

Brandon Opalka paints by day, he paints by night. He paints on walls, canvas, installations, invariably creating something new.

He moves from one medium to another with the same fervor, the same excitement, the same speed of execution.

It's the color that interests Brandon Opalka, whether posed by a brush or a spray can, applied with an air compressor or in coats of hot wax. Objects are soaked in it, covered, dematerialized, producing a novel interpretation.

He is building a body of work between assemblage and installation from which, on occasion, a canvas or a sculpture emerges. Recently, he is even inhabiting his environments, embodying figures from US popular culture and Florida in particular. Always the trash alongside the reverie. And the excessive world of Miami, the artist's home since childhood, is never far away.

Brandon Opalka talks about what he knows, what surrounds him. He draws the raw material for his art from daily life, without neglecting current events. Unpretentious, his work is an experience of life. It was in the streets, that the artist was first confronted by life (as well as death, with the loss of young graffiti artists from his crew) and by art.

He revisits his personal experiences, delivering them to us in a multicolored chaos. Jumbled in appearance, Opalka's plastic experiments unfold in the sphere of the unexpected with a certain taste for turbulence and the absurd. Welcome to the jungle of this urban savage.

• Melanie Bellue Lhoste Art Contemporain Arles, France