Painting is how
I hold onto moments that would otherwise pass by.
LANDSCAPES, INTUITIONS, CHAOS, BEAUTY... THINGS ONLY EXPERIENCED. NOT DOCUMENTED.
While my career has given me many titles, artist is the one I give myself. Painting is the creative pull I've followed for as long as I can remember, from a time when it was raw, passionate and from a place of pure expression. Today, years on, painting is now both that same expression and rawness, but also how I stay connected to this life. This world. I’m not formally trained as an artist. Painting, however, has always been there for me. It’s a creative pull I’ve followed from an early age. Over time, it became more than an interest. It became a way of paying attention to inner and outer worlds. I believe art is something we all have within us. It isn’t something we need school, permission, or a reason to justify doing it. Art is something we can do spontaneously, when we see or feel something we want to explore or hold onto. For me, painting is how I do that. The world is full of beauty, feelings, and chaos. All of it has its place, and all of it shows up in the stuff I create. When I paint, the noise drops away. When things click, hours disappear. The paintings I've created that I return to most are charged with aliveness. When I look at any one of them, I’m immediately back where I was when I first decided to paint it. In that sense art stores energy for as long as it exists. I’m sharing some of my paintings here in the hope that it encourages others to make something too…to pick up a brush, a pencil, a welder or whatever tool is on hand and make something. Especially now, in a world where many of us don’t work with our hands, this kind of expression feels essential. For me, it’s not just a pastime.
About Bryan Merica:
Themes
Named or not, an artist works in the themes of their soul.
As a painter, the themes I explore in my work are essential to expressing my artistic voice. These themes have evolved through years of observation, introspection, and engagement with the world. They provide insight into my creative process and invite viewers to connect with my art on a more profound level. Each piece is influenced by these themes, revealing a part of me that you can discover through my work.
Burst
A study in ignition. Pigment released before thought can intervene.
Color fractures, collides, and blooms across the surface in acts of ungoverned joy. These works surrender to velocity and accident, inviting paint to behave as weather, as laughter, as something briefly untamed.
The Cosmos
Inspired by the stars and the vastness of the universe.
These paintings explore wonder, scale, and the possibility of ancient ones who may have come before us from the great beyond and the traces they may have left behind.
Eggs (Deviled)
Deviled eggs are delicious. They’re also strangely beautiful.
What began as a running joke of my love for them among friends turned into an exploration of form, repetition, and playful absurdity with gobs and gobs of paint.
Heart
An archetype rendered without irony.
The simplest emblem, returned to again and again. A gesture of devotion distilled to its most legible form. These works hold a single address, though they speak in the universal language of longing.
Napa
Light settling over vines. Dust suspended in late afternoon.
Landscapes gathered from time spent in the valley and its surrounding hills. Horizon lines that breathe. Color that lingers like warmth on the skin. A record of place shaped by memory rather than map.
Shadow
The unseen made visible.
These paintings inhabit the interior terrain—the impulses, tensions, and contradictions we rarely display. Form becomes confession. Gesture becomes excavation. What is cast aside in daylight finds its contour here.
Trees
Vertical meditations on endurance.
Rooted yet restless, weathered yet alive. Trees stand as witnesses to time, their bodies inscribed by season and strain. Each canvas holds stillness in tension with growth.
Experimental
A laboratory of image and material.
Poetry translated into shape. Observations reframed as ornament. Surfaces layered, scraped, tested. Different mediums, different moods—yet all bound by a single hand in ongoing conversation with paint.
