Category: DRAWING AND PAINTING

Waiting Room, 2016

Posted on November 19, 2021November 1, 2026

Waiting Room was made as the set for Act I of a three-act play that was never finished. It was shown in 2016 at Lawndale Art Center in Houston in Double Digits: Lawndale’s Artist Studio Program, 10 Years and Counting, a group exhibition celebrating the thirty artists who took part in Lawndale’s Artist Studio Program in its first ten years.

The installation is a reception desk with no receptionist. It has a sign-in book and pen, a bowl of candy, a small succulent, a service bell, and a fishbowl holding a live betta fish named Ennui. Visitors were welcome to sign in, but nobody told them what they were signing in for, and no name was ever called. A charcoal and graphite drawing of numbers hangs above the desk where a clock would be. Every number shows at once, so time looks stopped, or broken, or no longer counting toward anything. (Ennui was not harmed in the making of this work, and lived another five years after the exhibition.)

The work is limbo. Limbo is a waiting room for eternity, where you’re processed but never seen. The installation brings that state down to the scale of an ordinary lobby, the kind of place where everyone has waited without knowing how long it would take or whether anyone was coming.

Act I: Waiting Room (detail), 2016
Charcoal and graphite drawing, betta fish, candy bowl, succulent, sign-in book, bell and pen.
Dimensions variable

Waiting Room detail: framed charcoal and graphite drawing of numbers above a desk with a fishbowl holding a betta fish, candy dish, sign-in book, service bell, succulent, and pen, 2016 by Bradly Brown

Waiting Room installation view: framed charcoal and graphite drawing of numbers above a wooden desk with a fishbowl holding a betta fish, candy dish, sign-in book, service bell, succulent, and pen, 2016 by Bradly Brown

Ennui, a red betta fish, swimming in a round glass fishbowl with white gravel on a wooden desk, part of Waiting Room, 2016 by Bradly Brown — Ennui, the live betta fish in *Waiting Room*, 2016.

Transpacific, 2012

Posted on May 20, 2014October 21, 2026

Transpacific (a line drawn from Texas to Japan), 2012
194 #2 pencils, paper, steel, pencil sharpeners
40″w x 72″h

Exhibited in Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star I, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth, TX, 2012
Catalog: Sons and Daughters of the Sun and Star (PDF). See also Damemoto, made for the Hiroshima half of the exchange.

Made for an exchange between Texas Christian University and Hiroshima City University, Transpacific is one continuous line drawn with 194 pencils on a single sheet of paper. By the old claim that a pencil can draw a line 35 miles long, together they hold about 6,790 miles of graphite, the distance from Fort Worth to Hiroshima.

The word Chorioactis is masked out and left blank. It is the Latin name of a rare mushroom, the Devil’s Cigar or Texas Star in the United States and kirinomitake in Japan, that grows only in a few isolated places in Texas and Japan. The drawing’s repeated marks echo its spores drifting between the two, carried by wind and chance. The piece is shown with everything left from the 194 pencils: broken tips, shavings, and stubs sharpened down as far as they would go. In her essay for the exhibition catalog, critic Lucia Simek pointed to Transpacific as a record of the exchange itself, the artists’ actual journey between the two cities rendered in graphite.

Transpacific, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Donkey Punch, 2008

Posted on April 9, 2010October 21, 2026

Donkey Punch, 2008
Mixed media on chalkboard
48″ x 72″

Donkey Punch is the album cover for Megafaun’s Bury the Square, released in 2008 on the experimental label Table of the Elements. Brown drew the image in mixed media on a chalkboard and then photographed it for the cover. He was also the art director and graphic designer for the release. Read the album’s review on Pitchfork.

The drawing is an illustrated picture of the music industry and works as a cautionary tale about the life of a touring musician. The donkey stands in for the nomadic life of the road: a tour bus loaded with everything you own. Snakes, bats and con men surround it, figures that show one face but turn out to have two. The traveler keeps moving forward anyway and finds a way through them. The music itself is the real weapon, but sometimes it needs backup: help from those who build the path. That’s the shotgun, marked “This Machine Kills Fascists,” the slogan Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar.

Donkey Punch was one of several projects Brown made through his design work for the label, where several albums came with their own creative project. See also Impala Eardrums and Side A.

Donkey Punch, 2008 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Impala Eardrums

Posted on March 25, 2009October 21, 2026

As Impala Murder, 2008
Salt water and hydrogen peroxide on car door
39.5″ x 37″

As Impala Murder is the cover art for Impala Eardrums: A Radium Sampler, a 2008 compilation from Table of the Elements’ Radium label. Both titles are anagrams of “A Radium Sampler.” Brown was also the art director, graphic designer and photographer for the release.

Brown found a Chevy Impala door in a Long Island junkyard and sanded it down to bare metal. He attached a stencil of a photograph to the door and sprayed it with a mix of salt water and hydrogen peroxide to cause it to rust. Once it dried, he removed the stencil, and the image was left behind formed in rust. Brown talks about the piece in this interview with KERA.

It was one of several projects Brown created through his graphic design work for the label, where several albums came with their own creative project. See also Donkey Punch and Side A.

Impala Eardrums — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Rusted Chevy Impala car door as found, before sanding. As Impala Murder

Impala Eardrums — artwork by artist Bradly Brown. Chevy Impala car door sanded down to bare metal, before rusting. As Impala Murder

Drawing Stairs, 2016–present

Posted on April 16, 2016October 23, 2026

Drawing Stairs (1-9), ongoing
Graphite / ink on paper

Drawing Stairs is an ongoing series built on a play on words. Brown seeks out staircases in public places and draws them on whatever paper he finds nearby: torn scraps, loose notebook pages, and abandoned notebooks picked up along the way. Each drawing is made on site, in graphite or ink, while Brown holds himself in an awkward physical position near the stairs for as long as the drawing takes.

Working this way in public turns the act of drawing into a kind of performance. People passing by slow down, stop, and stare as they try to work out what he is doing. The title names both halves of the work: Brown is literally drawing stairs, and at the same time drawing stares.

The found paper carries its own history into each piece, with ruled lines, spiral-binding holes, stains, and torn edges sitting alongside the drawn steps, railings, and landings.

Graphite drawing of a straight staircase with railing on found brown paper, Drawing Stairs by Bradly Brown

Ink drawing of a turning staircase on yellowed paper with white marks, Drawing Stairs by Bradly Brown

Fairytale of New York, 2008

Posted on April 10, 2010October 23, 2026

Fairytale of New York
2008
paint, thread, marker, ink
48″ x 36″

Detail of a dog or wolf amid dense colorful patterns, Fairytale of New York (2008), mixed media by Bradly Brown

Detail of a man in a suit crawling across a patterned ground, Fairytale of New York (2008) by Bradly Brown

Three Trees, 2012

Posted on April 16, 2016October 21, 2026

Three Trees, 2012
Unique digital prints
13″ x 17″

In Three Trees, the computer monitor becomes a camera lucida. Working from photographs, Brown redraws each tree by hand on screen, identifying every leaf while staying true to the original image.

The finished digital drawings are printed onto torn sketchbook paper. The ragged edges make each print a unique object, yet the image itself is infinitely reproducible. Like the cliché verre, the 19th-century process of printing hand-drawn glass plates on photographic paper, the work asks how an art object is valued: what is a physical print worth compared to the digital information that defines it?

The series is part of Brown’s ongoing fusion of drawing and painting with photography, a body of digitally crafted work that reevaluates tools and techniques from photographic history.

Three Trees, 2012 — artwork by artist Bradly Brown

Beastly Words, 2007

Posted on October 17, 2011October 21, 2026

Road Agent, Dallas, TX • 09.07

Beastly Words explores the fundamental flaw of language as an expression of our deepest selves, and the contradictions of language as image. Pained, repetitive words and phrases are subdued and channeled into new forms, given life as watery zebras, muscular tigers, an anthropomorphized WWII fighter plane, and breathless track runners.

Brown first creates film negatives from mysterious scrawlings recovered from a university library trash can—the aching and robotic exercises of an unknown author. Brown’s subsequent use of older photographic techniques to recontextualize the images, through Cyanotype and Van Dyke processes, naturally limits his palette to a calming range of organic browns and blues, fading or deepening depending on exposure to light. He imposes a more natural and visceral world on the underlying fumbling language, as well as foiling the hyper-Photoshopped slickness of our mass-media world.