I have spent the past two decades traveling throughout the country visiting museums, large cities, small towns, national parks, Civil War battlefields, assassination sites, graveyards, and national monuments. I am a lifelong student of the vast profundity of American music as well as a glutton for American history, literature, western painting, film, comic strips, and cartoons, all of which have consumed my nights and days. These interests and practices are harvested and used within my process to create an intertextuality in the paintings. Greil Marcus, the American author, music journalist, and cultural critic writes, “There is no theme richer for the American artist than the spirit and the themes of the country and the country’s history. We have never figured out what this place is about or what it is for, and the only way to even begin to answer those questions is to watch our movies, read our poets, our novelists, and listen to our music... America is the life’s work of American artists because they are doomed to be American.” Using historical references, literature, popular culture, personal memories, and personal aesthetic as sources, I’m focused on building a group of protagonists that encapsulate such themes as high and low culture, life and death, shape and content, love and loss, evolution and creationism, comedy and tragedy, mark and expression, and fame and anonymity.
– Brian Cirmo
–Flow: Works By Alumni Artists From Mohawk Hudson Region Exhibitions 2009-2017