Art Tour of Sequel Naturals

The Sequel offices – the home of Team Vega – recently got a new addition in the form of a series of beautiful painting by Victoria-based artist, Brandon Leudke. Brandon has worked with us for a number of years on a variety of projects and today he share the inspiration for these pieces and a little more about his background.

The main room our office is home to sales, finance, and operations. Two perspectives to show all the details of Brandon's work.

Our boardroom

The main office corridor now features four canvases.

Artist, Brandon, with painting in Charles' office.



Inspiration
Using west-coast BC nature themes, colours and textures, the pieces are informed by the holistic principle so integral to Sequel Naturals. Beautifully rendered in raw, mixed, toned and tinted colours, the myriad of symbols, patterns and textures combine to create a dynamic visual field reminiscent of many of natures finest creations: glacier scrapped crusted oxide rock faces, intelligently designed and microscopically interconnected cellular structures, opalescent and iridescent water films giving way to bursts of primary and prismatic colours - brushed, knifed, scrapped and spattered onto the canvas. The main regions are composed to rhythmically alternate between high and low energy; that is, to provide places for both active involvement and contemplation and renewal. Horizon-like lines, either actual or implied, act to tie together disparate elements the whole abstract landscape and further reveal the mechanics a grand and purposeful design across the entire series of paintings. The dramatic interplay of light and dark elements within cool and warm palettes add a subtle mystic presence of inner illumination, as if to invite a deeper interpretation of the meaning below the surface of paint and the artist's effect of it.

Background
No poetry here, just the facts: art in all forms – drawing, painting, sculpture, illustration, art activism, performance art, acting for film, theatre and improve. Graduated with BFA, honours in studio arts from University of Western Ontario with further education in architecture and engineering, graphic design, and web design and development.

Sequel History
Sequel founder, Charles Chang contacted me, through a mutual friend and vegan activist, Dave Shishkoff, to ask me to design and development the original MadarinForBCSchools.org website – one of Charles' many extracurricular community service projects. Later, after the completion of the VegaCommunity header design and two additional sites for Sequel Naturals: www.MacaSure.com and www.ChlorEssence.com, one of my paintings caught Charles' eye and he asked me to prepare an art proposal for the Sequel Naturals office. Now, over a year later, the art is on the walls!

Day Job
Leudke Creative is a one-person studio in Victoria BC, specializing in graphic design, web design & development, illustration and fine art. My daily work at Leudke Creative consists mostly of web and print design, web programming, technology research and abstract painting - all of which have been of value to, and continue to be utilized by, Sequel for many projects. Sometime my work expands into the realms film acting and improvisational performance, usually when I am particularly drawn to script or simply find myself craving an extrovert-o-clasm (this has yet to be utilized by Sequel).

Becoming Vegan
My full conversion occurred in one night in 1996, a few pages into Fit For Life II: Living Health, a somewhat sensationalistic yet profoundly illuminating book by Harvey and Nancy Diamond. My brother was elated to get the exclamatory call and drive to "my once a place of animal eating pleasure" to pickup forty dollars worth of freshly frozen meat from my freezer. The mental reasoning of the why is spoken by activists and written in books and all of the web - for the good of health, economics, ecology, altruism, compassion, ethics and spirit - the primal reason speaks from some bright and quiet chamber of the heart.