Music fans may know Brandon Boyd as the lead singer of multi-platinum-selling American rock band Incubus, whose hits "Drive" and "Wish You Were Here" were all over the radio in the early 2000s. Today, Boyd is still making music with the band, which released their eighth album aptly titled 8 in 2017, but he's also pursuing his passion of art.
Boyd has been doodling and sketching since he was a kid. You may recognize his work in Incubus' music video for "Drive" featuring animation by Boyd and his band mate, drummer Jose Pasillas, inspired by the lithograph Drawing Hands by M.C. Escher.
"I've scaled it up a bit," Boyd says of his jump from part-time doodler to full-time artist. "And I still doodle as well. I suppose having half of a lifetime's worth of practice in doodling, I have maybe given myself permission to doodle larger."
In 2003, Boyd released White Fluffy Clouds, a book of musings, poetry, lyrics, early journal entries, reflections, personal photographs and drawings. He followed that up with From The Murks of the Sultry Abyss (Volume 2) in 2007 and So The Echo in 2013, volumes that demonstrate his immense talent in artistic mediums as well as his evolution as an artist.
Boyd says releasing the books is a "spring cleaning process."
"In early 2002 and 2003, I was just sort of buried in sketches and sketch books and hadn't done a lot of painting at that point, but [I did] tons of journaling. I started to feel weighed down by it," he says. "It was cluttering my process a little bit and I wanted to clear it out, literally and spiritually."
Compiling some of that art "helped me get used to the process of people looking at the work," he says. "I have gotten better at it over the years -- doing it and letting go of it."
When creating the artwork for his current exhibition, OptiMystic, Boyd let the watercolors and acrylics do the talking. He says he selected colors based on his mood and frame of mind and let them spill onto the paper or canvas. The pigments mixing and coalescing would form an unintelligible blot that Boyd translated into existence by, as he says, "staring into the void." Once the colors revealed their secrets, he would begin drawing chaotic yet serene lines and figures in ink over the chroma.
He says he's noticed something "glimpsing back" in his work.
"I have always been fascinated with painting eyes. I like painting them in not the most traditional setting and I have noticed in a lot of my paintings, that a lot of the eyes are obscured or closed and the eyes are open other places. Maybe it's suggesting an inward glance."
When drawing or painting human figures, Boyd has used friends as sources of inspiration. In his work "Ali Enveloped," Boyd did a study of a photograph of a friend. Another piece began as a sketch of two friends in an intimate embrace.
Painting is "a little bit like a daily practice, I suppose," he says. "In other words, it is like a meditation. There is no particular point to it. There is no real reason that I am going out to my studio to paint other than I just love it."
Boyd's work will be on view at Samuel Lynne Galleries through June 2, 2018. Take a look -- or just stare into the void; you might just find it staring right back at you.
OptiMystic is on display at Samuel Lynne Galleries, 1105 Dragon St, Dallas.
