We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Brendan Kramp a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Brendan, we’re thrilled to have you on our platform and we think there is so much folks can learn from you and your story. Something that matters deeply to us is living a life and leading a career filled with purpose and so let’s start by chatting about how you found your purpose.
I painted and drew as a kid and always enjoyed it. It was something that came natural to me and my parents could put me at a table with crayons and pencils and let me go for hours. It was after high school and formal education came into play that I was “talked out” of art as a focus, even though I had been able to delve into it in high school. I never really thought it was an option for a future and career, I didn’t know anyone other than my art teacher who did that, and how to go about it. I ended up living abroad in Europe for 10 years and worked in or around the arts for part of that time, gaining exposure to many of the world’s great museums and galleries, which kept me thinking about painting again myself. I would say I sort of found my way back to my purpose slowly over several years where the desire kept arising to paint, create, get in a studio and see what happened. In 2012 I left a job in Washington DC to move back to Minnesota and had a gap in my work, and that became the opportunity for me to pick up the paint brush again and see what happened. I had time, I was a new arrival in my home city after 12 years, and I wanted to depict what was around me — the city, the hangouts, the coffee shops, the urban scenes. From there it just sort of happened on its own and I started creating large scale paintings of some of my favorite haunts in the city as I started to re-familiarize myself with Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?
I became a full time painter in 2019 after building up my art practice and portfolio for 8 years alongside my full time jobs. I’m now focused on further developing my craft and expanding the subjects of what I paint, as well as evolving my style. I’ve taken some leaps this past year by exploring a series of abstracted still life floral studies, with a very bright palette and loose, expressive painterly approach, as well as a more narrative and intellectual approach with a work that responded to podcasts I’d been listening to about time dimensions and the construction of our sense of reality through the senses. These are the things that keep me continually engaged and excited — expressing new ideas or finding new ways to convey a beautiful scene or moment. Then I jump back to a “classic” subject of mine — urban interiors — looking at an old cafe in Brooklyn I came across, or an unconventional view of Chicago, or a nighttime aerial view of Paris. I’m continually drawn to the different, almost endless effects of light and mood, and how our sense of a place or space depends on the quality and durability of light. I also get to incorporate many of my visits and travels into my work, which is always a huge interest of mine. This summer I traveled to several cities for art fairs in addition to time on Cape Cod, and I plan to paint a series this winter that draws from a previous trip to Nantucket as well as the recent images from Cape Cod. I want to convey the sense of being in the light and air that comes with the ocean, and bring the viewer into these classic getaway environments.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The three that come to mind right now are Persistence, Belief, and Experimentation. Pursuing one’s passion or artistic practice is like any other big life undertaking — you have to have persistence and keep getting up every day, even if it seems hard, and even if there isn’t an obvious reward, and keep going back and back and back to the practice. I draw a lot from the metaphor of the gym to any other endeavor — we all know how little we can lift and do on a first day at the gym, and a simply comparison with a month later after regular workouts shows how much we can grow, and how quickly. It’s the same for me with art and running my own business — there are daily gains, and then suddenly you look back 1, 6, 12 months later and wonder how you made all you did, and figured out so many things like where to show, what audience likes your work, how to create an effect, etc. This comes by just simply showing up each day and doing the work. Belief is also key, because you have to believe there is a path for yourself and a reason that you have your desire and passion. If you base this on the latest response or trend in art, you’ll lose it. You have to believe what you are doing matters, and find out why it matters to you. That usually is the fire that keeps you going in the tougher times. And finally, experimentation. I’ve done everything from play with inks to using spray paint techniques to drawing with charcoal to using fluid acrylics to doing garden motifs, city scapes, pet portraits, you name it. I keep experimenting when something interests me or draws me in and I try to see if I can do it, or create a new effect or feeling in a piece. They don’t always work and they don’t always need to, but I think that there is something hugely worthwhile in finding out why something appeals to you (especially in a visual or artistic way), then attempting to put that into your work and to create and do it from your own viewpoint. You can take things and make them your own, and they often will inform later work where you didn’t even know you needed that technique or effect. Experimentation also keeps things alive for me. I wouldn’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over, and none of the artists that I love stayed stagnant for long. They had bodies of work that they built upon, and then became known for something new. That’s my model and interest.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
I love the idea of artistic collaboration on a project or work. I’ve been rolling a lot of ideas around in my mind about some of the big themes out there — the environment, gun violence, inequity, inspiration, beauty — and how they might become the overriding push for a large, more public work. I’m fascinated by public art and performance art, even if I haven’t done them yet. I like the idea of collaborating with artists who are experts in these areas and can play and inform and bounce off the visual work that I do, and where we can come together on a theme. I’m also interested in the idea of joining up with the work of nonprofits and community groups that are working on tough, transformative issues. Gun violence has come up for me again and again as we watch the number of mass shootings and the regularity of gun violence transform our day to day lives. There is a deep well there to be explored and mined from the creative approach, one which I believe could truly tap into the change that we want to see happen, and the true toll that guns have on our society today. I’d love to partner with other artists and organizations to bring both awareness but also potential imaginative solutions to a better way of living and dealing with security. I do believe there is a huge opportunity here for the artistic community to get involved in this issue.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.brendankramp.com
- Instagram: @brendan_kramp_studio
- Facebook: Brendan Kramp Workshop & Studio
- Linkedin: N/A
- Twitter: N/A
- Youtube: @KrampBrendan
- Yelp: N/A
- SoundCloud: N/A
- Other: None
Image Credits
All the paintings are mine, no credits to give.
