Brutus is a figurative painter who depicts scenes from daily life, both real and imagined. All the figures in his work are African American, depicting a vast breadth of emotions and histories embedded in black experience. Brutus exaggerates reality by using vivid colour palettes and saturated tones, as well as bold contouring on the characters’ faces reminiscent of contemporary portrait artists’ such as Henry Taylor and Alice Neel. People appear in familiar environments such as at home, on holiday, and in the park, or suspended in dense abstract washes of colour that remove any notion of time or space. Littered throughout his oeuvre are references pulled from across literature, film, pop-culture, music, sport, and history, infusing the work with meaning beyond the canvas. Through these symbolic snapshots, Brutus highlights the historical forces that make us who we are, both collectively and individually.