Gary Brady didn’t pick up a paintbrush until his twenties. Today the Mobile native’s work hangs in one of downtown’s most visible galleries, and his path from athlete to classical-trained painter runs through Mardi Gras float warehouses, a storied Baltimore atelier, and thousands of water-damaged masterworks in post-Katrina New Orleans.
An exhibition of his latest works opened at Sophiella Gallery in downtown Mobile, 111 Dauphin Street, running through the Art Walk on Sept. 12 — and paired, unusually, with a listening-room performance by his wife, the musician Molly Thomas, accompanied by guitarist Rick Hirsch.
A quarterback who found the canvas
Brady’s talents first showed up on playing fields, not easels. “I never drew or painted or anything like that when I was a kid,” he says. “I was really into sports. I would go outside and ride my bike and climb trees, and later I played football, basketball, and baseball.”
His arm as a quarterback at Davidson High School earned him a scholarship to Lindenwood University in St. Louis. After a couple of years he came home, enrolled at the University of South Alabama, and aimed at a broadcast journalism career. Then came the part-time job that changed everything: building floats for Mardi Gras parades, elbow to elbow with working artists.
“I just thought, ‘This is interesting to me, and I bet I could do it, too,'” he says. “So I started drawing.” He changed his major to art — and then pushed further than a degree required. To build a rigorous classical foundation, he enrolled at the Schuler School of Fine Arts in downtown Baltimore, a small atelier-style program with roughly 25 students in total. “I went there for three years, and there were 25 students total, so it was very small,” he says. “I learned a lot, and it was very intense. The professors would yell at you, and I responded well to that. I wanted somebody to push me.”
Restoring masterworks in post-Katrina New Orleans
Brady’s résumé includes stops in Mobile, St. Louis and Baltimore — plus several years in New Orleans, a city whose character still shows up throughout his work. He arrived in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, when hundreds of paintings in private collections, museums and auction houses sat damaged by floodwater.
He grabbed a phone book, called the New Orleans Conservation Guild, and asked if they needed help with restoration. They did. He stayed five years.
“There were so many paintings that were damaged,” he says. “They were from private collections, museums, auction houses, you name it. I worked on Monets and Renoirs and Boguereaus and got to take a Van Gogh out of the frame and hold it in my hands.”
Working alongside the lab’s artists and interns, Brady helped clean and repair more than a thousand paintings, some lightly damaged and others ravaged by rising water. The work doubled as an education no school could offer: close, hands-on examination of how paintings are constructed across every style from realism to Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism.
Grayscale, on purpose
Brady is known for bold, liberal use of color, which makes his newest series a dramatic turn. For the Sophiella show he prepared 14 starkly monochromatic paintings — technically grisaille, the centuries-old practice of working in a single color, in this case gray.
“Sometimes, as a painter, you just wake up and say, ‘You know what, I’m going to paint in black and white for a while,'” he says. “I didn’t intend for it to go on as long as it has, but I’ve really kind of fallen in love with it.”
The paintings trade his usual vibrancy for shadow and restraint. Some stage a cityscape behind the silhouette of a woman facing away from the viewer; another is a portrait of Molly at her violin, caught mid-phrase. The couple met in 2020, not long after Brady came through a heart-related health scare, and their home in Point Clear holds two studios side by side — hers for recording, his for painting.
“She’s the biggest champion for my art, and I’m the biggest champion for her music and her pottery and jewelry making,” he says. “And that’s one of the beautiful things, that we are both so passionate about our respective art forms, but we don’t step on each other’s toes.”
A homecoming show
The Sophiella exhibition doubled as a joint event: a downstairs reception followed by an hour-long listening-room performance upstairs, with donations supporting the recording and release of Molly’s new album. Gallery owner Kim Kelly suggested pairing the two — something the couple had wanted to do for years. “We’ve wanted to do something like this, to have a show where we combine our art together,” Brady says. “And I hope that we’re able to have more opportunities to do it.”
The show’s run also connected to a busy stretch for Brady downtown: earlier this month he painted a large Jimmy Buffett mural on the National Maritime Museum of the Gulf during Mobtown Mural Fest, part of the museum’s new permanent exhibition on the city’s most famous musical export.
After the exhibition closes, his paintings remain available at Sophiella, where he has been represented for nearly two years. And he works on in Point Clear, in a studio he describes as a calm, quiet setting with fewer distractions than anywhere he has lived before.
“In other places, you do sometimes have excitement and uncertainty and stimuli that are not so much in your control,” he says. “Working on my paintings here is different because this is home, and it’s such a relaxed setting.”