Brandon Bird is an artist. He was born in 1980 in Carmichael, California, a suburb of Sacramento. He attended University of California, Santa Cruz and was an artist-in-residence from 2004-2006 at Risley Residential College at Cornell University. His most common medium is oil paints on canvas, but he has shown the ability to work with a multiplicity of artistic genres, including pen and ink and digital mediums.
He has a significant cult following for his tendency to paint figures from history and popular culture such as Christopher Walken, Chuck Norris, and Abraham Lincoln, in absurd situations. He has also organized four "weird art shows": Law & Order: These Are Their Stories consisted solely of paintings inspired by Law & Order and featured art by Bird and contemporaries such as Michael Kupperman, Jason Polan, and Kate Beaton, The Norton Anthology was a group of portraits of Edward Norton, the western-themed Days of Boom and Bust: New Art from the Gold Rush, and an earlier Law & Order-themed show, "Artistic Intent" in 2003.
On January 20, 2004, Bird's Law & Order-inspired coloring book, Law & Order: An Adventure to Color!, was presented to the show's star, Jerry Orbach, on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. Bird's work was featured in a July 2010 Newsweek gallery entitled "Portraits of Celebrity Weirdness", giving an overview of his works and the inspiration behind several of his paintings.
He is a regular contributor to The Believer. He has also done work for Las Vegas Weekly and The Aquabats.
His website won a 2005 People's Voice Webby Award under the "Weird" category. He is an associate member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences.
Reviewing his work for tor.com, Bridget McGovern said that "it's really not an exaggeration to say that Brandon Bird has managed to capture the soul of everything fun about pop culture in paint and canvas."
Famous quotes containing the words brandon and/or bird:
“They can kill us, but they can’t eat us. That’s against the law!”
—Gil Doud, U.S. screenwriter, and Jesse Hibbs. Brandon (Charles Drake)
“The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)