Dorias Brannon Leads a Surreal Imagery Path

Dorias Brannon Leads a Surreal Imagery Path

PHOTO BY MELATI CITRAWIREJA

The visionary mixed-media artist fuses painting and drawing techniques with collage, photography, and digital art.

Artists come from all over the world to live, study, and create in the Bay Area, but artist Dorias Brannon is a native son. Born and raised in East Oakland in a family of artists, he is a visionary whose mixed-media work is a fusion of painting and drawing techniques with collage, photography, and digital art.In high school, Brannon became more serious about making art and was influenced by the Surrealism movement. Two of his favorite artists were Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dali. They still are. He was accepted to the California College of the Arts after high school, but his family was unable to afford the tuition. Instead, he attended community college and began painting as a muralist. He was on the team that completed the Oakland Super Heroes Mural Project that grace the urban walls of West Oakland before focusing on his current work.

“I like to create surreal dreamscapes that range from out-of-this-world fantasies to symbolism that speaks to cultural and social issues,” Brannon said.

His process is never the same, and each piece is uniquely made with no formula or routine methodology to it. But beyond process and the otherworldly, chimerical quality of imagery steeped in multi-layered, brightly hued prisms, Brannon is mostly aiming to journey back to himself. “Throughout my life, art has been my form of therapy and self-care as a way for me to cope with and heal some of the not-so-pleasant parts of my life, a way for me to tell imaginative stories and journal about my life without having to write a word,” he said.

His most recent body of work is centered around spiritual and emotional growth and healing. With works titled Polarity in Paradise, Texture of the Dream Vault, and Lost City of the Midnight Portal, Brannon proffers a visual sojourn for the viewer. “Over the past year and a half, I’ve been in a deep practice of celebrating and honoring our Earth, life in all its forms, and the universe more broadly. I’m interested in that process of reweaving myself into the larger universal ecosystem, honoring it, and paying homage to it,” said Brannon.

He invites the viewer along for the ride, hoping people will walk away with a better sense of who he is and his creative realm but also their own experience. He aims to invoke a resonance within the viewer, giving rise to emotions and reflective thought and a sense of connection to something larger than ourselves by way of immersion into an imaginative space.

From this deep compassion for and inquiry into his own personal experiences, Brannon believes in expanding it forward. Through Aspiranet, a local organization that supports foster families with a variety of community programs and resources, he has taught visual arts at elementary schools in the Oakland Unified School District. In addition, he worked with Oakland’s Attitudinal Healing Connection, which offers educational programs dedicated to breaking the cycle of violence by cultivating creative expression and communication, teaching visual arts to middle and high school students. He works as a facilitator for Challenge Day, a Bay Area nonprofit that provides compassion-based community workshops, leading social and emotional intelligence workshops for at-risk teens.

Brannon summed up his work’s purpose by saying, “Life has been a journey of discovering my voice as an artist through different media and telling the stories I feel called to tell. Art has been, and forever will be, potent medicine in my life, and that’s something I feel compelled to put out there and make available for others to experience as well.”

He is developing a website to showcase his work, which he creates in his Hayward studio and can be viewed on his Instagram page.

Faces of the East Bay