Street scenes by Brian

Streetscapes by Brian McKelvey have become wildly popular. Brian is certainly a master of his craft.

He is described as Michigan s premier home portrait artist. His subject matter ranges from Mackinac Island to exotic locales around the country, with emphasis on the Great Lakes region. His career began at the age of three when in church he was given a pencil in exchange for his silence.

He has travelled around the Big Ten university cities of the USA , studying local pubs and hangouts as well as iconic landmarks to create beautiful posters of the cities. The Universities of Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and Notre Dame have all seen their towns turned into artwork, with Purdue and Ohio State also on his list.

His booming business thrives on the finely detailed downtown scenes of what he calls his “Pubs Of“ series: paintings that consolidate an area’s best watering holes into one nostalgic, beautiful and evocative image. 

“The idea came about when I was living in Mackinac [Island],” Brian says about his wildly popular streetscapes. “I started drawing different, limited edition pictures of landmarks on the island. A local shop owner came up to me when I was drawing in the park and asked if he could commission 50 prints to sell in his store.”

Even while the Mackinac prints were still gaining in popularity, McKelvey set his sights on painting more Michigan townscapes — including the sights of his alma mater, Michigan State University in East Lansing

“After finishing Pubs of East Lansing, the reaction of people was really good, and people kept approaching me saying, ‘You should do the pubs of Ann Arbor, Columbus, Madison,’" says McKelvey. "So that’s how the Pubs of the Big Ten idea came about.”

Brian has since finished 65 street scenes, including the Pubs of Lansing and the Pubs of Madison, and is working on the Pubs of Minneapolis and St. Paul.’ He’s currently wrapping up his tour of the hometowns of Big Ten colleges across the Midwest, creating prints that bring each downtown to life. He recently traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, to show local shops his newest masterpiece, and the response was overwhelming.

“I have so many orders for Madison, and more and more places in Michigan are now placing orders,” he says. “In the past year, one painting seems to snowball into others. Now I have orders for scenes that I made years ago.”

Business of Art

For Brian, the business aspect of selling the product is a key ingredient.

“I’m sure that I will have to hire some people to help manage accounts and just do the overall travel that comes with selling them,” he says. Brian’s Web sites, brianmckelvey.com and pubsof.com, will eventually become interactive sites that will let users zoom in to see detailed sections of all of the paintings.

He grew up in St. Johns, just north of Lansing, and comes from a line of artists. His father was a pastor who retired and took up art when Brian was 18. His uncle is a member of the Portrait Society of America, and owned and operated a graphic design studio after studying with renowned Bulgarian artist, Dimitar Krustev, in the 1960s. 

Brian started young, “Going door to door after high school, asking people if they wanted a portrait of their house painted,” he says. “Usually one out of every ten people I talked to ordered a painting from me. When you are going door to door, ten percent is pretty good.”

He used the money to help pay for his landscape architecture degree from Michigan State University.His inspirations are vast and range anywhere from famous abstract artists to childhood movies. 

“I’ve always been inspired by the expansiveness of Dali’s paintings—it’s a sort of balanced chaos," he says. "And I loved the way [Disney’s] 101 Dalmatians captured the feeling of London in its background, with the buildings kind of toppling over onto one another.”

Based on an article by Josh Marino.