Brian Cirmo

Artist Statement

I have spent the past two decades traveling across the country, exploring large cities, small towns, museums, national parks, Civil War battlefields, assassination sites, graveyards, and national monuments. I am a lifelong student of the vast profundity of American music and a glutton for our history, literature, western painting, film, comic strips, and cartoons, media that have consumed my days and nights. These interests inform my process, allowing me to draw from layered cultural and personal memories as I construct my paintings.

As an author and cultural critic, Greil Marcus suggests, the spirit and contradictions of American history persist through its cultural forms, shaping how we understand both the past and ourselves in the present.

Drawing on historical, literary, pop-cultural, and personal memory, my work focuses on crafting stories that capture the human condition within the American experience.