But arranging black glyphs on white paper grew tiresome, and starting in 2009, he turned to color and began to paint. At first, his paintings were cartoonish and comical, always paired with tongue-in-cheek artist statements on the meaning of each piece. Over time, though, he began to take his work more seriously, exploring color and geometry on large canvases (up to 4 feet by 3 feet), but never failing to pen an accompanying whimsical statement. But more and more the whimsy veiled serious social commentary, often on the dangers of transhumanism and the infantilizing effects of social media. Painting and writing thus combined in a Wagnerian Gesamtkunswerk, in which the combination of the two formed the total artwork.
He joked that his early humorous style—cartoonish and splattery, with an emphasis on narrative—was “on an overlooked axis connecting Jackson Pollock and Norman Rockwell.” But after studying the color theory of Albert Munsell and discovering the joyous geometries of the artist Stuart Davis, his work took a sharp turn. Still working on larger canvases, he began planning each work in detail, defining the exact composition of its figures and determining its color scheme in advance. The execution of the paintings took longer and longer, one even clocking in at 160 hours.
Borrowing a technique from 20th century classical music—and a technique perhaps never before applied to visual art—he produced a series of fractalized paintings that, at times, have a dizzying paint-by-numbers quality. They form a commentary on the compose-by-numbers technique of mid-century atonal composers, and are directly informed by the grayscale color theories of Albert Munsell. Since then, his style has returned to its comical roots, but with grayscales jettisoned for bold colors and the large, jazzy geometries of the American painter Stuart Davis.
His work undoubtedly owes a debt to the music of Charles Ives, whose polyrhythmic and polytemporal sonic landscapes translate into the intersecting planes of color and contrast that he hopes will delight the viewer. Just as Ives depicted the transcendent chaos of American life in sound, Brodhead mirrors the electronic entropy of our hyperconnected lives with color.