Brian Mark Bailey is a Cleveland-based painter and black-and-white film photographer whose work is a meditation on presence, faith, and inheritance.  Moving fluidly between canvas and camera, he documents the tension between labor and longing, the seen and the felt, the ordinary as sacred.

His painting style, which he describes as Contemporary Expressionism, draws from the emotional force of German Expressionism, the spontaneity of Abstract Expressionism, and the gestural power of artists like E.L. Kirchner, Richard Diebenkorn, and Joseph O'Sickey.  In photography, he works exclusively with 35mm black-and-white film, drawn to its restraint and permanence.  Influences like Saul Leiter and Henri-Cartier Bresson, painters before they were photographers, affirm his belief that seeing precedes capturing, and that truth often waits in the unnoticed.

Bailey's work is grounded in his Black and Puerto Rican heritage, his identity as a husband and father, and his walk with Christ.  Whether through paint or film, he seeks to preserve the poetry of the daily life, the tired hands, the overlooked corners, the quiet victories. His ongoing five-year photo project, The Craft of Legacy, serves as both a personal archive and a spiritual offering, made for his children, and for anyone longing to remember what matters.

He creates not to escape life, but to mark it, trusting that what is honest will endure.

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