Bryant Goetz (1988) is a painter living, working, and exploring in the Pacific Northwest. His oil paint and mixed media paintings are often large in scale due to his attraction to the confrontational nature of larger work. He is mostly concerned with the emotional and darker aspects of life and the ways in which those can be portrayed through portraiture and figurative painting. This lends itself to emotional complexity experienced when viewing the work in person. There is also a paradoxical nature to the work when bright colors and aggressive, childlike scribbles juxtapose soft representations of the face and body. There is less concern for a distinct narrative. Instead, he seeks to make each mark on the canvas as emotionally dense as possible. Aesthetically the work contains traditional elements representative of his formal education. But in many ways, it also reads as raw, urban, and self-taught through various attempts at un-learning and experimentation. Ultimately he believes it is important for paintings to be challenging as well as fun and beautiful.