Born in Upper Michigan State, Brian Despain was drawing as soon as he could hold a pencil. Having held a number of creative jobs from graphic designer to 3D modeller, photo-retoucher to illustrator he now concentrates predominately on his fine art career.

An all round art lover, Brian experimented with many different mediums before siding with digital (specifically Painter) and oils. Although it doesn’t necessarily stop there as he also occasionally forays into 3D models and has also spent time developing video games.

INDIGITS is delighted from all discerning robotic thinkology to have him on the A8!

1. What would you say is the most important theme in your work?
I don’t know if I’d call it a ‘theme’ per se but the most important aspect of my art is that I make it intriguing enough and inviting enough to coax a viewer into thinking beyond the painting.

2. What’s most inspiring to your working process?
Finishing.

3. Have you any strange talents that influence the work you produce or the way you produce it?
Hmm, the only thing I do really well is make art. That’s not to say my personality doesn’t infuse my art and my working process but I’d hardly label any of my various idiosyncrasies a ‘talent’.

Brian Despain

4. Which artist of the past would you resurrect to collaborate with and why?
Not one of them. I’d be trying to engage all of them so as to collaborate on some mind blowing piece of art that would turn the entire art world, nay, the whole freaking world, on its ear and launch a new paradigm of human existence cantered around the ideas of love, peace and prosperity and they’d be all like, “Braaaaaaains”.

5. Do you think your work is understood or misinterpreted and why?
I think to have one’s art ‘understood’ or ‘misinterpreted’ is impossible. A painting is only so much cleverly smeared coloured mud on canvas until the crucial moment when it is experienced by an individual. At that moment the painting coalesces into a unique work of Art (With a capital A), a blend of both the viewer’s idiom and the marks the artist has made. What that viewer sees, feels and interprets whilst looking at the marks before them is directly related to their life experience to that point in time. Do I have my own interpretations and experiences of my own work? Of course, however, my experience is just one of infinite possible outcomes of the singularity ‘viewer’ plus ‘painting’. My experience and the resulting interpretation is no more right or wrong than the next person, just different. Thus it is reasonable to say that because my experience while engaging a piece of art, be it my own or any other, is unique to me, and even unique to me at that specific moment in space-time, and that the same can be said of every other viewer to come in contact with my (or any) work, right and wrong, (Or put in other words, “understood” and “misinterpreted”) doesn’t enter into the picture… No pun intended.

6. If you could decorate one place in the world what would it be and how would you do it?
My neighbour’s house. I would finally get rid of that butt ugly ‘Budweiser’ park bench that sits unused in the front yard surrounded by a bunch of weedy plants whose only discernable purpose is to look like ass.

Brian Despain7. What to date has been your ‘cherry on the cake’ moment and what was it that got you there?
The birth of my daughter. What got me there? Well, when a man and woman love each other very much…

8. What we ask everyone! Does your artistic style influence your underwear?
Not so much in that I’ve got robots and skulls on them. I think instead that my personality influences both my artistic style and my choice in fine undergarments.


More info www.despainart.com


Images courtesy © Brian Despain