Brandon Deener - "Nina Simone” 2023®

25 7/8” x 20” Pencil, Oil Pastel, and Oil on Oil Paper

Brandon Deener, former producer for hip-hop and R&B royalty such as Timbaland, Missy Elliott and Lil Wayne, wears the multi-hyphenate badge well. He’s now known more as a visual artist and musician among other titles, dedicated to painting the Black community and carving its people a place in modern history by illustrating both boundless beauty and agency.

On why he paints long necks:

The long necks started to represent us as a people rising up. Rising up spiritually, rising up intellectually, rising up in our confidence. Being in the music industry, in order to come from those shadows of the people who I used to work with, and to not just be considered as such and such’s producer, but me as my own brand, I had to rise up into my own confidence and really just take control of my career and blossom into who I’m going to be. And I didn’t even know who that was yet, but I just had to take the necessary steps and work on myself to get to that point. Especially being from where I’m from, Memphis, Tennessee, I needed to really walk into that power I kind of hid myself from. -source

Brandon Deener on the web: IG | L.A.-based Afro Futurist Artist Brandon Deener – “That’s When it Became more Clear that Art is Going to Get Me Places that my Music Didn’t.”