Growing up, an introverted Brian Allen sought solace in art.
Born in the Bronx, he moved to Jamaica as a three-year-old to live with his grandparents as his parents, both Jamaican nationals, were having a hard go at life in the United States.
“I started sketching graffiti I saw on the walls. My first memory of drawing something on paper was of Haile Selassie. There was a mural of him across the street where I grew up on Spanish Town Road.”
That was the first piece of art I ever made, I was around 10 at that time, and was attending St Peter Claver Primary,” the now 35-year-old recounted to Loop when we made acquaintance on a New York sidewalk on a recent chilly winter day. The puffer-jacketed and Timberland-booted Bailey, seated on a folding chair next to a series of his pop-art-inspired and surrealist canvas paintings, had piqued our curiosity on our run to secure eats from a neighbourhood bodega in central Harlem.
At the intersection of 115th and 8th Avenues, which he’s made a base for the past three years to hawk his work, the street artist said: “what I have on display is everything in my imagination. There’s not really a perspective or a word for what I paint, it’s just me basically, my soul and my heart. I’m not really trained. I paint what I feel like the world needs to see.”
Recalling his pre-adolescent years spent back in the tropics, Bailey said: “I was a quiet kid that liked to stay to myself, I lived with my grandparents. They sold fruits and fish in the market.”
While his parents eventually came back to Jamaica, he returned to US when he was 13, first to New York for a month, and then to Virginia to reside with relatives and complete his secondary-level education.
“I did art class all four years in high school in Virginia. They weren’t really teaching me anything. I was there more to just have fun and chill,” he recalled of his exposure to the rudiments of art.
Bronx-born Brian Allen spent his early childhood in Kingston.
Bailey, who subsequently relocated to The Big Apple and maintains a day job working at a warehousing facility, shared: “I started painting on canvas in the last five years, and sell my art in Harlem and also on West 4th Street and the East Village.”
Sales are good for the artist. He told Loop that his pieces fetch between US$25 and US$300 with buyers being predominantly black or Latino.
“I sold five paintings yesterday,” he disclosed. “Mostly African Americans and Hispanics buy my paintings, a few whites do too, I am not going to lie but when I am dressed differently. If I am wearing a Rasta hat or sitting on the floor, or extreme situations, whites gravitate more to that. You have to be a bum to get their attention,” Bailey noted.
According to him, his style of painting is a sum of influences and artistic inspirations. “The first artist I really got into was Jean-Michel Basquiat. I saw a movie on him and started researching him. I like the freedom he has in his artwork, there is no structure to anything, he goes and paints, but he thinks about it, so it looks messy but it’s actually genius,” the self- taught New Yorker assessed. “I like Jackson Pollock and I love Banksy, he is dope. I also like Van Gogh and Keith Harring, they came from nothing and built their way up. Their work was so different and simple but still beautiful and has a story.”
A diehard hip hop fan, and currently dating a Ghanaian emigrant pursuing her studies in healthcare, Bailey said within the next five years, he sees a life beyond the street as an established artist. “My dream is to make a living off my art and for people to understand and
see that I am not just trying to make money. I’m trying to tell a story and show you the world as it is.”
By Omar Tomlinson
