AF DIE & Print

I'm a Boston-based artist working in multiple media and genres including painting, digital work, photography and sculpture. I'm currently working with a Nikon D610 & D810 cameras/lenses as well as HD cell cameras such as the Motorola one hyper 64 MP. My digital manipulations and post-production photographic work, I use a variety of digital tools such as Adobe Photoshop Elements and Irfanview. I'm working increasingly with cell cameras to produce images - especially candid and street photography. Cell phones are so ubiquitous now you can get away with a lot more. People aren't so intimidated by their use even in more intimate locations. I've been using a moto X pure with a powerful 21 MP rear camera and have just upgraded to their new 64 MP rear camera in the Motorola one hyper edition. I've made a good part of my living as an R&D lab technician for high tech firms but have always been a struggling dedicated artist. My strongest influences are Francis Bacon / Cy Twombly / Antony Gormley / Sigmar Polke / Hans Hofmann / William de Kooning / Rauschenberg / Jasper Johns / Thomas Struth just to name a few. I specialize in abstraction and demolition/disaster porn as it has been referred to - as in the ruin porn genre. I'm drawn to the textures, patterns, colors, and chaos - scenes of neglect and detritus as well as street photography and passing strangers. I typically move from pop to grunge seamlessly + everything in between! I'm always testing visual forms and genres. I like to play and experiment. It's actually difficult for me to stay in one place. It all depends on what I'm looking at at any given time and place. I have little interest in popular convention or the addiction to the prejudices of polite society. I'm not especially fond or sympathetic to religious and political dogmas. manuelbranco 02/22/2018 “We plan our lives according to a dream that came to us in our childhood, and we find that life alters our plans. And yet, in the end, from a rare height, we also see that our dream was our fate. It's just that providence had other ideas as to how we would get there. Destiny plans a different route, or turns the dream around, as if it were a riddle, and fulfills the dream in ways we couldn't have expected.” -Ben Okri