artist biography

Brandon Wallis is a New Orleans based artist creating mixed media works through collage, paint, layered paper, and collected fragments.

Originally from Ocean Springs, Mississippi, a Gulf Coast community with a deeply rooted artistic tradition, Wallis grew up surrounded by creative influence, including the legacy of Walter Anderson and Peter Anderson, regional architecture shaped by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the imaginative visual worlds of Mississippi born puppeteer Jim Henson. He also cites fellow Air Force veteran Bob Ross as an early influence for his emphasis on atmosphere, patience, and process.

Wallis holds a Master of Arts degree in Management from American Military University and previously worked in technical instruction within the United States Air Force. His background in scientific instruction continues to shape the methodical structure underlying his studio practice. Though emotionally driven, the work is built through deliberate layering, revision, experimentation, and controlled process. He frequently documents techniques, observations, and evolving systems privately as part of the development of each series.

Long drawn to diorama, collage, and mixed media, Wallis began fully integrating these approaches into his practice in 2026 after years working primarily in digital art and acrylic and oil painting. His work draws from memory, symbolism, repetition, intimacy, and the emotional residue carried by ordinary objects. Using receipts, paper ephemera, photography, glaze, and textured painted surfaces, he constructs compositions that exist somewhere between painting and artifact.

Many of the materials used in the work originate from places personally visited and documented over time. Wallis maintains a large archive of photographs, receipts, and collected paper fragments that later reappear throughout evolving bodies of work. Living in New Orleans continues to shape this process through the city’s layered atmosphere, creative community, ritual, instability, ornament, and visible accumulation of history.

While rooted in collage, the work increasingly moves toward painterly space and quiet abstraction. Fragments dissolve into surrounding color fields, edges soften into atmosphere, and recognizable materials become part of a broader symbolic landscape. Still life, memory, and abstraction frequently intersect within the same composition.

Working in small evolving series, Wallis approaches each piece as a singular object rather than part of a reproduction based practice. Every work remains one of one, reflecting his interest in rarity, material presence, and resistance to mass reproduction.

He currently lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.