Who is Bryan Brinkman?
Bryan Brinkman is an award-winning multi-media artist who utilizes his career in animation and motion graphics to create fun and inventive ways to convey ideas about creative processes and the digital art that are approachable and appealing. His works have been featured at Sotheby’s and Christie’s and he has worked on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Saturday Night Live, and a number of other projects in film and animation.
In the video above Bryan breaks down his creative process on three artworks, Strung, Autonatonomy, and Cycle, he also reflects on his early experiences with digital drawing software. Featured below is a text interview with Bryan, focused on earlier artworks.
What are you trying to explore when you’re in the sketching phase of an artwork?
My initial goals are to create works that tell both my story and perspectives but are reduced into simpler forms that anyone can relate to. When sketching ideas, I'm usually pulling in visual ideas and then building them into commentary. I tend to keep these loose and quick, trying not to get stuck on one idea too long. Then I let them simmer and return to them and see which one sparks the most inspiration.
Your pieces create a shared visual world, including colors and symbols which recur. How does a symbol become adopted into your visual world.
Usually, new symbols are formed because they have a universal story of meaning in a piece. Often I find myself drawn to images that are seen in the emoji lexicon because that's our universal visual language. Bringing those visuals back in future works helps link ideas from one piece to another.
Ice Cream Deconstructed is an early draft that became your later work, Downpour. What were your thoughts on including the ice cream cone initially, and what changed between the sketch and the final work?
Around that time I had been creating work about candy and candy packaging with my metaverse builds, and this piece played into that theme. I also was inspired by dada-ist work like "The Treachery of Images" by Magritte. I loved the idea of sprinkles coming from a cloud, which then transformed into colored raindrops in the final piece which fit better with my Cloudy Collection.