Brandy Kayzakian-Rowe's first creative memory is in her father's Keene workshop, carefully cutting and assembling a wooden letter A. The five year old girl knew instantly that she wanted to be an artist. She would go on to explore drawing, painting, sewing, fashion design, and interior design, among other artistsic pursuits. Immediately after college she began to explore the country much in the same way that she had explored art, finally settling for a time in Memphis, Tennessee. While working as an art teacher during the day by night Brandy Kayzakian-Rowe was exploring the local music scene, camera in hand.
"While working as an outreach art teacher (for the Dixon Gallery in Memphis) I taught some of the poorest children I had ever met, some of which had never even used a crayon before," says Brandy. "When I showed them all the materials and methods, I saw their spirits come so alive with magic. I felt something from them that I hadn’t really seen from another child or adult. Seeing the life force in these children arose within me the desire to capture this kind of excitement in art. Several of the parents of these students then began to take me around their towns and show me the local culture, the most inspiring of which was Clarksdale, Mississippi, a town known as the crossroads and the birthplace of Delta Blues."
Brandy's love of the south couldn't outweigh her wanderlust, or her husband's dislike of the heat and humidity. The pair traveled for a time to the Pacific Northwest, where Brandy began to experiment with watercolor painting, before finally packing up a U Haul and driving to the East Coast. They made it as far as Manchester, New Hampshire before deciding it was time to stop and settle down. Now, reunited with the area that started her on her artistic journey this artist continues to create. While much of her photography and paintings are still focused on the Southern music culture she fell in love with while in Memphis she has started to find inspiration in the people and places of New England.
What is most captivating about the work of this talented artist is the way she is able to blend her two cultures in her art. The meshing of these two very different society creates something fresh and exciting for the viewer. Brandy Kayzakian-Rowe can take something a New Hampshirite has seen a million times before and breathe new life into it. Her blending of the colors and the atmosphere of her two homes makes you look twice at something you thought you already knew so well and see something you hadn't noticed before.
If you would like to see more of this art her work is available on the web at her website. She keeps an Etsy shop for her prints and has a newly created website solely for her travel photography.
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