It is impossible to walk through downtown Saugatuck without being drawn into the open doors of an art studio in the center of town. The James Brandess studio and gallery is housed in a historic building that was once Saugatuck’s post office. Brandess is known for his paintings of the Saugatuck dunes and lakeshore, and the flowers growing around him, as well as 450 portraits of Saugatuck residents, and counting. But Brandess wasn’t always a resident of either Saugatuck or Michigan.
“I started when I went to school,” Brandess says. “A couple years after high school, I started photography at Columbia College in downtown Chicago. I was interested in street photography. I would walk around with my Canon 8E1 and take and develop the photographs. I had a small apartment, and I converted the kitchen into a dark room. I loved Columbia College, and one of the things they did, and I think they still do, is to find jobs for their students.”
Through that job program, Brandess took a position as a photographer’s assistant. Brandess says the best thing about that job was that he realized photography wasn’t what he wanted to do for a career.
“I wanted a more hands-on way of making images,” he says. “I really wanted to paint images of people. In the summer of 1986, I took a pastel portrait class at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then I took more classes—and then it became all I wanted to do.”
Next, Brandess landed a job at the Ox-Bow School of Arts and Artist Residency in Saugatuck, Michigan. He worked there for six summers, reluctantly returning to Chicago for the winter months. Brnadess fell in love with the area and the town’s people fell in love with him. He was offered a studio space and took it. No more Chicago winters. Although his space has changed over time, his attachment to Saugatuck has only grown stronger. When a local reporter interviewed him and wrote an article about the portraits Brandess was doing of a few residents, the idea caught fire.
“When he wrote about it, I thought, that is a really great idea,” Brandess says. “And that was the start of the Saugatuck portrait project.”
The James Brandess Studio and Gallery is located at 238 Butler Street in downtown Saugatuck, and open daily.
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