(suspenseful music) - I am in Albany, New York about to step into the studio of artist Brian Cirmo.

Follow me.

- I am a person who thinks that being alive and being human is a very absurd thing.

(music resumes more intense) It's something I'm always trying to approach with humor, because it's almost too overwhelming to look at life and say, well, what is the meaning here, and, what are we doing?

(intense inspiring music) The work that I'm making, it doesn't get made unless I'm listening to music, I'm reading, I'm watching films, thinking about personal memory, personal experience, all that stuff is just kind of, gets synthesized into the work.

(music fades) There's cubism in there and there's, you know, "Peanuts" cartoons in there, Bob Dylan is a huge influence, and then there's some jazz ideas in there, so it just kind of all kind of comes through as you make the work.

(whimsical music) There's a painting that I did a couple years ago, and I was looking at the pool paintings of David Hockney, and another image I was obsessed with was "Vision After the Sermon" by Gauguin, there's two figures wrestling in it.

So I said, all right, well, I want to make a a painting where two figures are fighting or wrestling.

and I want it to be by a pool or something, so that's it, like, I don't know where it's going from there.

As I made it, I started to think about the game we all played when we were kids, Marco Polo, like, that was the game I played with friends when we were in the pool, so I just all of a sudden said, well what if I titled the painting "Marco Polo"?

And so, that's kind of how ideas just kind of come together in the process of making something.

(whimsical music ceases) (idle music) (bass strings play) I start off with drawing, I just sit down and I just start making lines, and a figure will arise, or a shape will come out of it, sometimes they're very abstract.

And then once I find something, it just feels right, then I start to refine it and revamp it and change it.

Once I have everything figured out, composition, scale of what I want the painting to do, then I transfer that small drawing onto a large painting, and then I start to make the painting.

But when I go into the painting, I have a pretty solid idea of what I want, it was all worked out in drawing.

(idle music ceases) You are made up of the things that you did when you were a child, the things you learned in art school, the things you learned about being in your studio on your own, from drawing from other artists, all that stuff stays with you and it all just slowly develops into something.

And what you're looking for is, how do I fit into all this?

Where can I fit into this kind of cannon of art?

I'm telling some kind of story, and it connects not only to my time, but I think it connects to the cannon of art history before it.

I think any artist that's working, and is serious about what they're doing, is part of that.

(deep electric guitar music) I don't necessarily know how to build a traditional painting, layers and glazes and things like that.

I was taught from very contemporary painters, and so I paint wet on wet.

And my color palettes have always been very much grays and earth tones and blacks, and I always just am drawn to that kind of color palette.

Did this one painting called "Gray Tree", (music turns introspective) and there's a reproduction where a painted Mondrian's "Gray Tree" in the background, it has this kind of really kind of gray, ominous quality to it.

And at the time I was reading Sinclair Lewis's "Babbitt", and in the book there's a line that says, "Gray fear loomed always by him now."

(cymbals rattle) I started to think about gray matter in terms of the brain, the human brain, and this idea that it's not only a gray palette, but it's also tapping into human emotions, human experience, which is, you know, the gray matter of the brain.

And I said, I'm gonna make a series of paintings that are dealing with this very kind of ominous quality, and really tap into the psychological turmoil of these characters.

(introspective music intensifies) I think anyone's job as an artist is to bear witness to their time.

I think we're all, I don't care what kind of art you're making, what materials you're using, the subject is always the same, it's the human condition.

How do we deal with being alive?

How do we deal with being human?

What does it mean to be human?

If we wanna melt down all the artist statements in the history of the world, it can all be boiled down to the idea of the human condition.

And for me, I have to stay engaged with that.

(music turns tranquil and optimistic)