Bryan Lewis Saunders, Crazy or a Genius?

Within the last month I discovered something that was one of the coolest artistic expressions I have ever seen. It had such depth and got me questioning the art like I had never done before. How some people would say that a painting speaks to them, I felt this when viewing these images. This piece or should I say pieces is a series of self-portraits that one Bryan Saunders posted on his blog. He not only is a talented painter but he is able to convey a feeling through his paintings in which I can rarely perceive. Even with a lack of popularity it shows that true artists can be found anywhere.

Bryan's blog consists of all his artistic endeavors but for the case of this description I will explore his self-portraits. With thousands of self portraits he has tried to group them into distinctive groups in which he has almost created separate galleries for different events in his life. These subsections include anxiety, yellow month, nature, drugs, love and pain. Not only are each one of these categories unique in theme, it almost seems as if different artists created them. The categories are a series of art and anthropic experiments in which Bryan puts his emotions and sometimes health in jeopardy in order to get his feelings on paper. Such an example, and probably what he is most known for is a series of pictures in which he created while under the influence of drugs. These portraits specifically depict how one feels under the affects of such substances and this is really the series of paintings that grabbed my attention.

After taking a look at some of his other galleries, I became in love with his style and charisma. The way he is able to depict the central theme of himself yet in so many different medias and styles, he makes seem as if more than one artist is involved. I am now a huge fan of this completely underrated artist and cant wait to see more of what he will put out. His paintings have the ability to make one evaluate how they see themselves, and it provokes so many questions about ones self and the artist behind these pictures. I think that everyone should check out Bryan's blog and I hope to see more great thought provoking expression from him in the future.

(photo by: taod from: flickr)

Thanks for reading,
David