Why 6-foot-8 Hebru Brantley picked art over sports | Renaissance Man with Jalen Rose | New York Post

From Jalen: I first heard of artist Hebru Brantley, this week’s “Renaissance Man” guest through one of his sneaker collaborations. (If you haven’t seen his dope 2019 Adidas collab, check it out.)

But his work is collected by boldface folks such as George Lucas, Lenny Kravitz and LeBron James. In 2012 at Art Basel, Jay-Z dropped a cool $20,000 on one of his paintings. He has had exhibits all over the globe including Asia and South America. But he is a true Chicago guy hailing from the Bronzeville neighborhood, who got his start as a graffiti artist tagging his hometown. So that’s where I wanted to start: his roots.

He said his art is about creating narratives using characters informed by his childhood in the Windy City, where inspiration seemed to blow into his life at an early age, courtesy of his surroundings, basketball and his cousins.

“If you read the Sunday funnies, if you read, like, Charlie Brown, Peanuts, like, Charles Schulz could say whatever he wanted to say and would do it through these characters,” he told me. “And so that was sort of my way in where it’s like using these characters to get out my message, my personal feelings, beliefs. And Chicago really helped shape that because, you know, at a point that was all I knew, for real. And those streets shaped me, and the people there shaped me and my influences.”

If you saw Brantley in the produce section of your supermarket or at your neighborhood bar, you’d probably assume he went to college on a full ride for basketball, instead of attending film school.

“I grew up in a family of hoopers and the craziest thing, like I’m 6-foot-8. And all my cousins could draw, you know, and so it was like we would be out all day playing ball right off Lake Shore and come back to my aunt’s house, my grandmother’s house, whatever. And and just, you know, draw.”

He’s a fan of Bugs Bunny, collected comic books and was a young “aspiring sneakerhead” though admittedly he was too broke to truly be one. So he started sketching kicks instead. He also drew superheroes.

“And so that was, like, a big bonding time for all of us. And, like, you know, I had a cousin, one cousin that played in Louisville for a minute, Alvin Sims and Alvin and his brother man … They could draw and paint. And, you know, they were early inspirations to me.”

His other great influences were art luminaries of the 1980s like Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, not just from an aesthetic point of view, but the way their work has been democratized and made accessible through brand collaborations and putting art on clothing or household items.

#HebruBrantley #JalenRose #RenaissanceMan

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