Brandon Willett

Originally from Winston-Salem NC, Brandon made his way to Charlotte by way of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte for his formal art training.  There, he received a BFA with a concentration in Illustration and a minor in art history.

Brandon is currently involved with an international arts group, Mangola, out of Austin Texas. He taught art full time at Trinity Prep in Charlotte for the last seven years. His great passion is instructing young up-and-coming artists about the basics of the discipline and understanding their creative gifts through visual and spiritual expression and communication. 

He is a mixed media artist utilizing collage, acrylic, marker, ink, dye, charcoal, wax, photo transfer, found object and found images etc.  His process comes from a myriad of influences such as Robert Raushenberg, Jean Michel Basquiat, Keith Herring, Jackson Pollock, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, street art, outsider art and children's art.  He works in process, with minimal planning diving into mark making until the image is birthed utilizing even mistakes as part of the work. He pulls his imagery from religious iconography, urban America, communist propaganda, old textbooks and encyclopedias and old testament themes. 

"The definitive meaning of an image, or for the whole of art for that matter, isn't always obvious.  It beckons us to come closer, think harder and look deeper.  Art, as a visual communication, would be doing society a grand disservice if it were always so obvious as to what is was declaring.  We as viewers, readers or listeners would never grow."