[Words and photos by Justin Fox Burks]
While working on a story about
Memphis rappers 8Ball and MJG for
Wax Poetics,
I started to notice all the hand-painted signs on buildings around the
neighborhood Orange Mound. The ones that stood out to me were all
signed by ‘Brick.’ His larger-than-life, colorful animations of
creatures and letters are more than just signs for local businesses.
Whether his work depicted a hawk or lion or car, he seemed to
understand scale: a lion from 100 yards away had to be five times
life-size. I began to feel connected with his paintings before I even
knew who he was.
I
started to ask around the area: who is Brick? Most people stared at me
blankly. But one morning a guy buying a forty at a sundry store on Park
Avenue told me, “I know where his brother lives.” The guy took off down
the street, and I followed in my truck. Two blocks down, he pointed at
a house. A man opened the aluminum screen door, and inside, I spotted a
painting of a pink bird in the style I had come to know so well. Thomas
Brigance, Brick’s brother, put me in touch with Doris, their sister.
The next week, she took me to see Brick, who I came to know as James
Brigance, in a nursing home in Marion, Arkansas.
James
Brigance is an amazing man, but he is ill: he has lost both of his legs
due to complications from diabetes. Now in his mid-fifties, he lives in
a nursing home. He explained his paintings by simply saying, “I pick
the color; they buy the paint.” In our conversation, he mentioned that
once he was up on a ladder at a job, he would be in a trance, painting.
He painted for thirty years on the interior and exterior walls in his
Orange Mound neighborhood. He still draws every day, using markers now.
He plans to one day "get back up on them walls."
This
work, above all else, is a documentation of Brick’s paintings, because
they are disappearing; they are being painted over every day. To me, it
reveals the way that real people are living around true art away from
gallery walls and pretense. I see these images as a collaboration
between myself and Brick.
