lights of the main road (2008) Painting by Glenn Brady

My name is Glenn Brady and i was born in 1966 and raised in Brisbane on the Nth side of the city in a suburb that was the same as all the other suburbs around it.
I roamed the streets of my suburb daily...half of it rows of wooden houses mostly built in the 1950's..the other half a large industrial estate with plenty of large,hot ,galvanised iron sheds which gladly opened there doors for any teenager fed up with school or home,or both....so they could pursue a career in sorting nuts and bolts,cutting out plastic shapes or shaping cheap wooden furniture.....its no wonder everyone i knew was on a variety of drugs and alcohol,roaming the streets on bmx bikes or cheap old cars from the 70's looking for girls or something to do...no future sport stars amongst us....
I wanted to paint it...badly..but didnt know how...and i wasn't interested in anything else....so

Punk rock introduced itself in all its raw, new, angry glory to me when i was 15 in 1981...and i jumped head first into it..oh yes!..having much fun with many types of people...funny,loud,rude,crazy,violent and in many cases now, dead...
25 years later i paint these average looking streets and the people ,good and bad,normal and strange,happy,in love,angry and sad and unloved,or forgotten, who dwell among the never ending grid of main roads,car yards,video shops and fast food joints...a filthy factory on one side of the street..a beautiful jacaranda tree on the other....
I have never travelled far and never lived in another land..but have learn't over time that there is beauty here because there's nature..and there's people... trying to make there lives better...
But as with everything with me i am always split between the love and anger of things around me in what i hear and see..frustration ...

Depression,medication, shock treatment and psyche wards became a part of life when i was around 26,but i had hidden my' problems' since i was 16, with alcohol mainly...always pushing the anxiety and panic attacks away with hidden drinking....bottles stashed around the house..skulling beers in the toilet before having to catch a train to the city..
Can't keep that up forever...

So i just paint as much as i can..a couple of times a week i'll see something, or something will pop into my head that i want to paint..sometimes from years and years ago..i get alot of colours from watching the sky at different times of the day..from this i can then shape the rest of the painting around those colours..i watch alot...shapes of things....my heart soars when i paint..i can punch teachers and priests and endless politicians,and 41 years of tv sitcoms,horror news,wars and bullshit,square in the face and not be kicked out and beaten by bouncers!..I can stick my hands up and yell anything that i want.try to 'unlearn all the things ive been told from childhood onwards about life and death and how to be..and make my own version of what i believe..my own small world... i can try to half-arse match my '...

• Nationality: AUSTRALIA
• Date of birth : 1966
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Australian Artists