We were lucky to catch up with Brennan Alexa recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Brennan, thanks for joining us today. The first dollar you earn is always exciting – it’s like the start of a new chapter and so we’d love to hear about the first time you sold or generated revenue from your creative work?
My first dollars earned as a creative came at a crucial time. I have always been making work, but I didn’t share it until lockdown April 2020. With so much time on my hands and no work, or unemployment checks to cushion me the first several months. I was creating work and selling it predominantly through Instagram. I was blown away by the support I received in the first few months. I believe because most of us were at home, we wanted our home spaces to be filled with treasured things and that included art. I think the timing with that, the way I share my work with a long caption as a story on my Instagram, the fact that the BLM movement was in focus because of George Floyd’s murder, and the fact that no one had seen my form of creating before made the perfect conditions to share my work. I was blessed. That’s not to say that it has been smooth sailing since, but my start was catalyzed by the combination of the events I mentioned above happening all at once.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Brennan Alexa and I am a digital artist and designer based in Connecticut and I sell my digital collages as prints on my website brennanalexa.com. I find inspiration from the natural world and in soft displays of human affection. Mountains, rivers, moons, and human embraces make frequent appearances in my work. My style is bold, colorful, spiritual, and abstract. I began this form of expression when combining my background in relief printing with a desire to bring dimension and layering into creating digitally. I missed the texture and layers of working in real life and I wanted to give the impression of depth in my digital work.
I make all of my prints in Photoshop. Using a similar process to relief printing, Using multiple layers with images of textured papers and colors to “carve out” or layering the a final product. My process begins with using an image, memory, or space, as my reference. I then select my colors. Usually purple and orange are my favorite color combinations, but I favor using as many colors as possible. After I have my collection of images of paper, I arrange them as separate layers in Photoshop. Then by using the Lasso tool, I draw or “carve” out sections of the reference image. As I work through my layers from background to foreground. Along the way, I am playing with opacity, saturation, enhancing or toning down the colors, copying pasting, erasing, and manipulating it in all the ways I can. I work an image a 100 different ways before I believe that I have arrived at a final piece. Sometimes a finished work can take many years, and sometimes it can take a mater of minutes.
I am never attached to the end result of a print because I learned from my time in school as a printmaker, that if you love it too soon, it most likely will change before you have even arrived at the end. I treat my work like it is a journey and that usually means that I am surprised by the end result. All I can do is direct color and movement along the way.
What makes me feel most proud about my work is the audience that it connects me with, often it is people who are not necessarily religious, but spiritual in a sense that they find meaning in the world around them beyond what is literal. I love when my audience teaches something I never saw in my work. Because what I make is often so abstract people are able to see many different interpretations of the original intent. Some people see exactly what I intended and some people will show me what is on their heart when they are taking in my work. It’s really beautiful. For me it is the connection between me and my audience that is the most important. I believe my work can be inspiring, vulnerable, and unlike anything I have yet to see.
I can’t fully say what I would like for people to take away from my work other than to share what they felt in connection to a certain piece and share their story of why it meant something to them. As an artist, but really as a person, I am just wanting to figure out how to to be the best person I can and to tell the story of how I got there. If someone didn’t know what steps to take towards creating or really doing anything they are unfamiliar with, I want them to know that the very thing that frightens you most is more often than not the key to the medicine in which you can distribute to the world.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Oh man. Unionize the muses! Proper pay to help us all support the lifestyles that grow us. I see a lot of that changing with everything happening in digital market spaces. Artists are able to have and build community, followings, and audiences from all over. There are so many wonderfully talented people in the world and if the world was better equipped to support them, I am almost certain we wouldn’t have so many testimonies to personal and public destructions of self. If there were more grants, more collective spaces for artists to gather and build community in non-urban spaces there could be more collaboration, more feedback, more momentum to inspire. But I believe the nature of the artist is to be a critic of society, to reflect it back, or make new what never existed in the first place. If we were all living in a Utopia, would there be a need for the artists and the game changers?
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
The biggest lessons that I have to unlearn always stem from my own personal insecurities and how they play out if I let them run me. Number one is imposter syndrome, always feeling like you’re faking your way through life. I have had to rebrand that narrative in my head from faking it to improvising. Rolling with the punches and getting out of your head long enough to get that work out there. Next I would say that I struggle with what makes my work important enough to share. This one is a funny one. If I make work just simply because I am curious and then share, people usually respond well and can feel the authenticity. But if I shift to thinking, what will make me money or what will my audience want to see, they can always sense the fear and one-dimensionality of something made in that energy. Sometimes I will get into head spaces where I think my work is garbage, but then out of no where someone will reach out to me and thank me for sharing my work because it reminded them of someone or something important in their life and then I remember my mission that my art is not for me to judge. In those moments I believe that it is God speaking to me and telling me to keep going.
Contact Info:
- Website: brennanalexa.com
- Instagram: @__brennanalexa__
Image Credits
All photos captured by Kenna Reed for a wonderful flower shop in Honolulu called Paiko.