Brandon Carlton is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice explores labor, memory, identity, and the construction of culture through painting. Influenced by a childhood spent on construction sites alongside his mother, Carlton approaches painting as a process of building—layering, shaping, and negotiating surfaces over time.

Working primarily in portraiture, he creates figures that exist between presence and distance, drawing from both personal experience and the visual language of contemporary culture. His paintings examine how images shape our understanding of ourselves and others, revealing the ways identity is constructed, circulated, and transformed.

Carlton’s process favors immediacy over perfection. Often working on found and familiar surfaces, he blurs the boundaries between fine art and everyday life, treating painting as both a physical act of labor and a means of cultural inquiry. Through scale, repetition, and material experimentation, he develops a visual language that reflects the complexities of visibility, representation, and survival.

His work has been exhibited nationally, including a solo exhibition at Arts + Public Life at the University of Chicago, and has been presented at ARTMIAMI. Across his practice, Carlton continues to investigate how images function as carriers of history, power, and human connection.

For Carlton, painting is more than representation—it is an act of endurance, presence, and possibility.