b. 1986
Beginning at age eight Brett Marcel (b: 1986) underwent formal art training. As a Catholic school student in his youth he was heavily influenced by iconic religious art, and later by the abstract geometric mandalas seen in alchemical and Buddhist works. As a young adult, Brett’s journey in drug counterculture further affected his work in a spiritual psychedelic direction building upon the religious influences of his youth. Marcel received his BFA (Painting and Printmaking) and MFA (Visual Arts) from the New Hampshire Institute of Art (NH) and has exhibited in New Hampshire, New York, and Seattle.
“My work is intricate, maximal, and psychedelic. Through painting and silkscreen I create auric and kaleidoscopic fields of interlacing design, coupled with hieroglyphic pop imagery, to support figuration and portraiture. My process is game-like and strategic. I categorize and systematically rotate motifs of abstraction: action expressionistic, hardline geometric, and sixties swirling color fields. These categories of abstraction symbolize specific non-visible aspects of the individual; their psychology, personality, imagination, potential, and energy. The interplaying layers of abstraction in a mandala structure provides a playful fluctuating platform for my subjects to take off from or build upon. For me, largely as a result of my own shamanic experiences, any sign or symbol is imbued with transformative meaning. The alchemical permeates our surroundings and any sign has the innate power to be utilized didactically. In the same stride as traditional alchemical and esoteric art, the tarot deck, for instance, provides us with a meta-technology. Its utility can be a spiritual navigational interface to guide us at pivotal points of our lives, or a tool to assist in the visualization of one’s development. I aspire for my work to hold a furious optimism for the future. It serves as an invitation for people to develop their own modes of visualization, realize their potential for growth, and to engage in the world in a transformative way.”
Q. If you could offer your younger self any advice at the start of your artistic career, what would it be?”
A. “Artists don’t need a college. At least one that is going to put you in paralyzing debt :)”