Down to earth, Brandon Landers paints mainly about his black community, familiar faces with whom he grew up. An artist in his mid-30s based in Bakersfield, California, lives in a shack near his friend’s house, often sleeping on an upper bunk above the piled canvases and splattered paint. He is far away from his origins in South Los Angeles, as his main job is teaching art to young children at an elementary school in Bakersfield, an environment much different from what he was used to.
I came across Landers’s artworks surfing through the Internet. I guess I was trying to explore what kinds of visual artists are really out there, really connected with their communities.
Amidst emerging figurative artists, Landers is one of the few black artists who has jumped into the pool of those painters, who, in his own terms, has painted with his own interest in subject matters and applications of medium surrounding the black human experience.
In spite of public’s growing interest in his artworks, Landers has been good at keeping them at bay. He feels awkward and uncomfortable dealing with them or even the kind of fame some emerging artists tend to seek. He sees his working process in transition. I read in one of the articles. He said, “Once I get into a bigger studio and feel more comfortable, then I’ll make that decision.” It seems that Landers knows how fame can get to one’s head, a starting point for failure.
Without a doubt, Landers is strongly connected to his family and roots. His mother, who passed away at 55 without having a chance to see her son’s exhibition, provided love to his son that he remembers to this day. Growing up in South Los Angeles, Landers was kept away from the dangers of inner-city pitfalls by his mother, who always guarded him and guided him towards benevolent paths in life. In that protection, Landers found drawing as a way out, but also a way to dive inward towards creativity. His love for art deepened in high school when he injured himself and couldn’t play basketball, which furthered his practice in art.
Watching his family, friends, and relatives growing up around him, Landers feels blessed by their support system, but he also knows that many of them have not found their way out of their environments for upward mobility. As such, their stories are shared on the canvas, painted in ways that Landers knows how, pigments applied with palette knife in crude manner, resulting in irregular surfaces. The faces of these beings are distorted, often in groups, with their toothy grins, sometimes situated against backdrop of backward texts.
The space in which all these figures inhabit is spatially suspended, devoid of clear grounding. Element of surrealism kicks in. Several curators agree on one thing – Landers is really taking off. Vikki Cruz, a former curator at the Bakersfield Museum, and Connie Butler, the Hammer’s chief curator, both praise Landers for his tenacity to practice and delving into fully embodied humanity. The colors of humanity, for Landers, are black, brown, yellow, and red, the tones of familiarity for the Black Angelenos, whose lives have been fraught with both violence and support from each other.
I personally have not been exposed to black art until now, not a contemporary figurative painter such as Landers. His paintings are humble but unapologetic about approaches to painting and themes, both pulling back in modesty and pushing forward for attention.
