About the artist
TLDR
I’m Brian Pierce, an artist based in Western New York. I have been painting professionally
since 2013, working primarily in oils. My work includes portraits, animals, flowers, and sacred
art
My Story
I did not come to painting the way people usually do.
Before this, I was working in tattooing, creating art at a different pace, around people, outside of myself, and in motion. Then everything changed. Illness came, and with it disability, and slowly my world became smaller. My room became the place where almost everything happened. Even now, much of it still does.
I can only paint in short stretches of time. Because of that, each work takes far longer than it once would have. Most paintings take months, sometimes longer, to complete. There are days when I am bedridden and unable to move at all, when creating is not possible in any traditional sense.
And yet, when I can, I return to it.
What Remained
In many ways, I lost what I thought my life would be. Friends drifted. My relationship ended. My work changed. My sense of who I was in the world changed with it. There is a kind of loneliness that does not fully leave, it becomes part of how you see everything.
And yet, something else began to form in that space.
Painting became a way of remaining present. A way of remembering beauty when I was no longer able to move through it freely. It became a way of staying alive inwardly when so much of life had been taken away outwardly.
I paint in my small room, usually at night, often with music playing quietly in the background. The process is slow and intentional. Nothing about it is rushed. Each piece is built in fragments of time, shaped by limitation, patience, and persistence. It develops in its own cadence.
Something Like Prayer
Over time, painting has become something like prayer.
Not always in a formal sense, but in the act of turning attention toward something beyond myself. I often think about God while I work. I pray before I begin, and sometimes while I paint, even if the words are not always clear. There is a sense that what I am doing is not only for me.
I return often to the same subjects. The face of Christ. The quiet presence of an animal. The fragile beauty of flowers.
I do not approach them as symbols alone, but as reminders. That there is meaning in what is gentle. That there is dignity in what is small. That even in suffering, there is still something whole underneath it.
Living with illness has taken much from me, but it has also forced a different kind of seeing. It has made time feel heavier, and beauty more immediate. It has made silence more present than noise.
Sometimes painting feels like the only place where I can put everything that has no other place to go.
What the Work Carries
Each work carries that weight. Not in a dramatic way, but in a quiet one. A record of endurance, of attention, of trying to make something meaningful inside a life that changed completely.
When a piece leaves my hands, it feels like something of me goes with it. Not in a sentimental way, but in a real one. These works are not separate from my life. They come directly from it.
I do this work in part to support myself, to continue living, but also because I do not know how not to. It is how I stay connected to beauty, to faith, to something steady when everything else has moved.
My hope is simple.
That whoever lives with these works feels a sense of peace in them. A reminder that beauty still exists. That life, even in its brokenness, is still capable of meaning. And that, in some quiet way, we are still seen.
I am grateful for every person who chooses to support this work. It means more than I can easily explain.