We recently connected with Brian Cirmo and have shared our conversation below.

Brian, appreciate you joining us today. Have you been able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen? Was it like that from day one? If not, what were some of the major steps and milestones and do you think you could have sped up the process somehow knowing what you know now?

In 2002 I graduated with an MFA in painting and drawing. Unable to support myself off my work, I started working as an adjunct professor at multiple area colleges. Along with being an adjunct professor during the day I also worked the 4 pm to midnight shift as a security guard at a local college. For the next fifteen years, I taught college courses during the day and worked security at night. I had a studio set up in the kitchen of my 700-square-foot apartment and would work from midnight to 2 or 3 am every day and on the weekends. All the while I applied to hundreds of open calls for art exhibitions, artist grants, and artist residencies, as well as sending my work to endless galleries across the country. Slowly but surely, I built up a local exhibition record, followed by multiple national group exhibitions and several solo exhibitions.

With fifteen years of teaching experience and an active national exhibition record, my resume was strong and in 2017 I was hired as a full-time tenure track professor at a junior college which increased my income threefold abling me to move out of my kitchen studio and into a slightly larger space and apartment. Having a full-time teaching job also afforded me more time for painting since I had three months off in the summer and a month off for winter break. The increased presence in the studio allowed me to produce more and explore multiple materials, scales, and concepts in my work, and in the subsequent years, I was awarded three artist residencies.

Over the past 20 years, I have built a diverse and supportive network of fellow artists, critics, gallerists, art historians, and curators. In 2019 a good friend passed my work along to a New York City gallery and they were interested in exhibiting my paintings. Since then, I’ve been able to work with multiple New York Galleries, International galleries, and art advisors as well as participating in several national art fairs. These opportunities put my work in front of a whole new audience of national and international art collectors and over the past four years, I have been able to build a base of collectors for my work.

Any success I’ve had with my work has been hard fought for. It takes focus, dedication, commitment, and stubborn determination. Could it have been faster? In retrospect yes but as they say hindsight is 20/20. At the time I was learning as I went along.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your background and context?

I have lived and worked in Albany, NY for the past 25 years. I was born and raised in East Utica New York; a small 20th-century rust belt city located in central New York. I grew up in a working-class family and was raised by my single mother. I was a below-average student but always excelled at drawing and by the time I reached my junior and senior years of high school it was pretty much all I did. I was a C student with little to no ambition to attend college, but with the encouragement of my high school art teacher, I put together a drawing portfolio and applied to a local art school. I was accepted and, In the autumn of 1995, I walked into my first college drawing class, and it was at that moment that I knew I had come home, I had found my people and my niche in the world. From that moment on I was 100 percent committed to becoming a visual artist.

My upbringing, particularly the people in my neighborhood, my friends, my family, and the philosophy of working-class Americans is a huge component of my work. It is my childhood and the environment that I grew up in that I looked to when I began to explore the work that would eventually guide me into my mature work. As my practice became more honed, I began to build upon my resources and research. I have spent the past two decades traveling throughout the country visiting museums, large cities, small towns, national parks, civil war battlefields, assassination sites, graveyards, and national monuments. I am a lifelong student of the vast profundity of American music as well as a glutton for American history, literature, western painting, film, comic strips, and cartoons; all of which have consumed my nights and days. These interests and practices are harvested and used within my process to create intertextuality in the paintings.

Using western painting, literature, popular culture, personal memories and history, and travel as sources, I’m focused on building a series of paintings that encapsulate characteristics of the human condition, such as life and death, love and loss, evolution and creationism, comedy and tragedy, fame and anonymity, conflict and harmony, and morality and immorality.

My working process has taken over twenty years of practice and research to develop. I’m proud of the profound level of content and craft that I have reached in my work and I’m confident that it has universal appeal, it is built on the bedrock of high art, low art, literature, history, western painting, and the 20th and 21st-century American zeitgeist.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

The grandiose goal would be to communicate, tell stories, tap into the human condition, and explore what it means to be alive. I want to be part of the history of art, for my work to stand alone in its own spot and to inspire and infect the hearts and minds of its viewers. That’s what art has done for me and that’s what I hope my viewers and collectors ultimately receive from my work. And I hope the work brings a bit of levity along with the heaviness, humor in art has always been undervalued.

The superficial goal is financial freedom. Of course, having financial success is certainly not a benchmark for “good” work. There are many artists who make extraordinary work and never achieve the financial success they deserve. What financial success brings is the freedom to make my work with total focus and commitment without the worry of working a second or third job to support my practice. Financial success allows me to have the continuity of time which has been vital in my progress to reach a higher level in my work.

Can you share your view on NFTs? (Note: this is for education/entertainment purposes only, readers should not construe this as advice)

I’m not fully sure I even know what NFTs are and I’m proud of my ignorance. Material, physical forms and structures, the smell of paint, the ripping of the canvas, the sensations that come with the sounds of an artist’s tools and studio, and the surface of a handmade object or painting can never be replaced by a digital world, not in the long term. The digital world and technology are wonderful tools and I use them often but for me, they simply do not and cannot compete with the physical world of the art object.

Stand in front of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon while simultaneously having a digital image of it on your phone and you tell me which image has more impact on the human experience. If you choose the digital image on your phone, I fear you may be lost.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.briancirmo.com
• Instagram: b_cirmo
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BrianCirmoArt/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-cirmo-5b544b70/