Allison Roberts·September 23, 2025
In a world where everything is homogenized and spoon-fed to us, Brandon Woods‘ work is a tonic. Inspired by the science of perception and the intricacy of mathematics in nature, Brandon ventures toward the surreal on canvas and film. He combines his interests in woodworking, painting and photography to create abstract art that transcends traditional boundaries.
Brandon, whose work is currently on exhibit at the downtown Tomato Head, met me at his studio at Broadway Studios and Gallery. The 1127 N. Broadway studio was established in 2015 as a resource for Knoxville’s art and culture, offering art classes, exhibit space and artist studios. Popular exhibits have included the Gaudy Gold Frame Show in March and, more recently, The Body Farm featuring Esther Sitver in August.
I’m surprised by the ample space as I walk in. Brandon’s meticulous personality is apparent in every corner, including his paint storage. “I would have never thought of storing my paint like that,” I tell him.
He graciously welcomes me in. As he moves a large-format print from the table, I asked him where he got it printed — F32, he answers, referencing the camera shop off Kingston Pike.
Brandon’s love for photography is a marriage of his fascination with light and color and a healthy dose of childlike wonder. “It’s a release into the unknown,” he says.
He shoots through an array of prisms mounted on the end of his camera lens, projecting their refractions onto the final image. The result is a tantalizing, fanciful collage — radiant rays of geometric shards produce a shimmering, ghostlike sheen over the fractal subject matter. It’s a treat for the eyes.
But Brandon’s creations don’t stop with the camera. He also maintains a woodshop in West Knoxville, where he makes custom geometric canvases for his dynamic paintings.
The progression of his work into a three-dimensional experience is a self-inflicted struggle. He taught himself trigonometry and, using the golden ratio, can construct a canvas with each aspect measured to the thousandth of an inch on a microscopic grid. With his unique handmade canvases, he launches the painting into the viewer’s space. The paintings have a presence, as if they become part of the wall, owning the space they inhabit.
His canvases are stimulating in color and form, exhibiting a geometric and organic sensibility and featuring lush colors or unique textures, with incorporations such as gold or linen. Brandon creates each painting with the viewer in mind. His mantra for working is that he is at his best when considering the audience.
“It’s not so much about my experience, but about the viewer’s experience,” he says. “When they approach a work of art, their lives have led up to that moment. Aside from the pretentious snobs of the art world telling them what to think, the viewer brings their best self to it, and it’s a mirror of their best self. It’s not what I put in, but what they get out of it.”
With this idea, Brandon has been involved in several exciting projects. His interest in the mathematics of nature led him to participate in the James Webb Space Telescope project, which invites artists to create work inspired by the telescope. He says it is an example of the “best part of us” in technology and innovation.
“Part of the beauty of the images produced by the James Webb Space Telescope is that they also contain a trove of data that will lead to insights and advances in science, which will shape and expand our understanding of who we are and our place in the universe,” he says.
The Emporium on Gay Street, the Arts and Culture Alliance, the City of Knoxville and the National Endowment for the Arts funded the installation.
Brandon’s favorite work so far is a painting titled Ascension, which he says “profoundly speaks of beauty.”
“Until my James Webb Space Telescope project, this was the largest work I had ever created, and so I went as big as I could possibly go with the content, too. This work is about beauty, God and outer space. I drew inspiration from the great cathedrals in Europe — from the masterworks in them, such as Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin, and the lux nova, or holy light, pouring into those cathedrals, which draws the eye upward to the heavens.
“Considering other meanings of ‘the heavens,’ I thought of outer space and chose a nebula as my source imagery because of the immensity, power and beauty that these vast areas of space hold. Throughout the process of painting the imagery on the panel, I sought to honor God by eliciting the same sense of awe experienced in those great cathedrals, and to embrace and pursue beauty for the truth that beauty holds,” he says.
Brandon grew up in the Bluegrass area of west Knoxville and attended the Christian Academy of Knoxville. He says the best part of high school was his art classes, where he had free access to the school studio space. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art from Middle Tennessee State University in 2010. After that, he attended the Savannah College of Art and Design, where he received a Master of Fine Arts in 2015.
He told me that Savannah is a great city to visit, but living there is very different. He missed the mountains of East Tennessee. Brandon now lives off Washington Avenue in Parkridge. When I asked if he would like to live anywhere else, he said, “Upstate New York. My wife is from that area. It’s so similar to our mountains here.”
“We recently did six national parks in seven days,” he added, noting that Colorado could be another alternative. Brandon loves the Smoky Mountains, but he also loves Knoxville’s art scene. He feels a sense of camaraderie with the other artists in town. However, he believes the artists are too isolated. “We desperately need to have an arts hub — like Asheville and Chattanooga,” he says.
While Knoxville has several art centers, they are scattered throughout the city. First Friday is generally a cluster of shows on Gay Street and Jackson Avenue, leaving galleries outside downtown with few visitors. Brandon believes any artist with a cohesive body of work can exhibit in Knoxville but notes that subsidized space for artists is not available. “Artists need a leg up,” he says.
He was fortunate to be a recipient of the Arts & Culture Alliance’s Betsy Worden Memorial Artist Residency, which subsidized his studio rent and exhibition fees at the start. The Tennessee Arts Commission also provided a grant for show materials.
“These opportunities are really valuable,” he says. “I would love to see people in Knoxville buy more local art. I’ve seen this missing in Knoxville. I know designers who work in furniture stores, and people will spend a lot of money on furniture, but they won’t pay the same amount for artwork. I think they are missing out. If an original artwork speaks to them — that’s an aspect of their best self, enriching their best self.”
“Maybe the artists of Knoxville are not communicating that well enough,” he continued. “We love the people in Knoxville, and we want to see them at openings and art shows.”
I asked about his inspiration before we parted. Brandon said he is on a journey that “deepens my understanding of the world and my place in it and encourages my viewers to do the same for themselves.” He spoke of “the beauty found in nature, the beauty found in science and innovation, and the mathematical structure of flowers.” He said he aspires to “explore the planets and stars and our relationship to them through science and mythology, and to investigate the effect of geometric patterns on our visual perception and the role memory plays in that process.”
His next venture is to send his art into space with the Galactic Library Preserve Humanity. The GLPH is a partnership of Polkadot and BitBasel’s Art for Impact Space Program to preserve humanity’s creative vision by sending selected artworks to the moon aboard Astrobotic’s Griffin-1 lander as part of NASA’s CLPS program. Artists worldwide submitted 2D works that interpret the U.N.’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, and these works are preserved by revolutionary Nanofiche technology, designed to withstand the harsh environment of outer space for millennia.
Beyond this honor, Brandon has also showcased his work nationally and internationally, from Knoxville and Oak Ridge to New York, as well as in Singapore and France. His work is on display at the downtown Tomato Head (12 Market Square) through Nov. 2.