Does art imitate life or does life imitate art?
It’s a problem similar to the chicken-or-the-egg question. Looking at the definition of art, they seem to be one in the same. Art used as a verb stems from “to be,” as many of us who have ever studied Shakespeare know. It may then stand to reason that art is a form of being.

Los Angeles artist David Brady makes art his life and life his art. With a focus on the figure, Brady transforms seemingly amorphous and meaningless everyday experiences into form.

It wasn’t until his late-twenties that Brady made the conscious decision to devote himself to visual art. As a child, Brady was more involved with theater and music. Other than decorating his lunch bags, most of his creative talent went towards the performing arts. In high school he tried a few art classes, but quickly became frustrated with them. “ I thought it should be much more liberal,” Brady says about his one attempt at a formal art education. “ I didn’t want to learn how to draw a chair. I wanted to learn how to be creative.”

Even in his teenage years, Brady recognized the key ingredient: creativity. Drawing a chair is just that, drawing a chair. Add creativity to it and an inanimate object is given a soul. The viewer can identify to the piece through emotion.

Paint stroked onto a canvas and then covered by a screen can conjure feelings of loneliness and isolation as they do in Brady’s “The Refuge.” Otherwise meaningless and discarded items when glued together by the artist’s creative impulse emote powerful images. The figure in “The Refuge” peers apprehensively from behind a screen-a dividing line, but a line between whom? Between the figure and the audience? Between the artist and the world? Between us all? That conclusion depends on the individual.

This is one of the reasons why assemblage art fascinates David Brady. Traditionally, an artist draws a bottle. Assemblage art allows the artist to incorporate a real bottle, an actual item with its own history, into the piece. That bottle can trigger a completely different response in each of us since we link our individual experiences to it. Brady does not want to dictate what his audience should feel. He wants the pieces “to trigger [the viewers’] own memories to generate their own responses. I think truly that’s what art is.”

Assemblage has not always been Brady’s medium of choice. A self-taught artist, Brady has worked with a variety of styles ranging from photo-realism to abstract art. He looks to artists like Francis Bacon, Picasso, David Hockney, Rauschenberg and Miles Davis for his influences. Each of these artists constantly reinvented the type of work he did. Brady works in much the same way. He constantly challenges himself with new styles and tools. Brady’s theory is to do “whatever gets you back into the studio and be creative.”

Part of that challenge is finding new mediums with which he can work. Brady has worked with pretty much every traditional and non-traditional art tool. His preference may be “anything tactile,” but he claims to have a “certain fondness” for oils because they will always challenge him.

Much of Brady’s work develops from “trying to solve a problem.” Part of his problem solving applies to combining tools, including the newest medium available, the computer. “I will generate things in the computer for the purpose of integrating them into traditional mediums,” comments Brady. Just as we insert information into and then extrapolate information from the computer, Brady uses it in much the same way with his art. He’ll scan something into it, pull it out, glue a piece of hair or part of a map on it, paint on it, scan it back in, pull it out and paint on it again. It’s a never-ending, constantly changing, trial-and-error process.

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