Brian Lee Clements is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans design, photography, journalism, and woodworking, informed by both scientific training and a lifelong drive to explore how meaning is made. He blends analog and digital processes, favors tactile methods grounded in historical practices, and approaches each project with a careful balance of form, utility, and narrative intent. Whether crafting letter-based conceptual art, documenting the emotional landscape of scientific fieldwork, or building mid-century inspired furniture by hand, Brian’s work is guided by curiosity, shaped by deliberate technique, and rooted in a deep respect for process. What follows is a categorical portrait of a practice shaped by intersections—of mediums, disciplines, and ways of seeing.
Brian Lee Clements holds a Bachelor of Science in Geophysics (2013) and a Master of Science in Geology (2015). He currently works as a professional subsurface geologist for the California Geological Survey. While his scientific career remains significant, Brian identifies first and foremost as a multidisciplinary artist—someone who weaves together a range of practices to interpret the world from multiple perspectives.
Brian has pursued graphic design both formally and informally since his teens. Over the decades, he has worked across analog and digital formats, building a skill set that includes custom, hand-coded websites for collectives, galleries, artists, and consultants; typographic design for websites and posters; logo and identity systems for independent consultants and private industry; and screen-printed posters for tactical, public interventions.
His design sensibility draws from independent magazine layouts, poster design, and the interplay of letterforms, with an emphasis on simplicity. These influences eventually led him to establish a private letterpress studio in 2023—complete with a vintage, poster-size Showcard Press, antique wood type cabinets, and a growing collection of 19th- and early 20th-century metal and wood fonts. Following the destruction of this letterpress studio in the 2025 Eaton Fire, Brian is slowly rebuilding his letterpress practice on a smaller scale. In this history-rich space, he explores typographic design that predates the contemporary notion of the “graphic designer” and creates letter-based, conceptual art through a tactile, intimate, and more deliberate process—a welcomed pace in a rapidly evolving world.
Brian dabbled in 35mm film photography in the mid-1980s before formally studying darkroom techniques in the early 1990s, where he was immediately drawn to the slowness and intimacy of large-format (4x5), available-light, shallow depth of field environmental portraiture. In the early 2000s, he briefly transitioned to medium format (6x6) twin-lens and single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras. Now, he primarily uses a full-frame digital SLR, but maintains the same large-format sensibilities, maintaining an emphasis on the frame. His camera serves as both a fine-art image maker and an extension of his independent journalistic pursuits. His approach is influenced by the environmental portrait work of Rineke Dijkstra, Judith Joy Ross, August Sander, Richard Renaldi, and Albrecht Tübke.
Following the destruction of his decade-spanning collection of photographic equipment, film negatives, and darkroom prints in the 2025 Eaton Fire, Brian is slowly re-establishing a connection with photographic image making.
Brian’s journalistic pursuits explore the personal, emotional, and cultural layers that intertwine in scientific and creative practices. These pursuits were inspired in the early 2000s while briefly exploring individual fine artists’ work and perspectives through video interviews and documentation. More recent projects include documenting the collective experience and drive behind an ocean-based research cruise, as well as publishing in-depth interviews with geoscientists across multiple geoscience disciplines. Brian emphasizes depth over volume while employing creative nonfiction techniques—especially story arc—throughout the processes of development, interviewing, and editing.
Currently, Brian is in the development and exploration phase of a new, slow-media, community-focused web publication project, where he continues to focus on stories that reveal how individuals create meaning within their chosen fields and how those fields, in turn, shape the individual.
All woodworking tools, hand-made furniture, and custom art frames were destroyed in the 2025 Eaton Fire. Prior to this destruction, Brian used a hybrid approach to woodworking, combining late 19th- and early 20th-century hand tools with modern machinery. Hand-tool techniques allowed for a deeper connection with the wood—offering close attention to grain, joinery, and material strength—while power tools were incorporated to save time during the dimensioning of raw lumber. From meticulously crafted solid walnut bookcases to custom laminate shelves to cabinet-grade built-ins, each piece was guided by a curiosity for learning, attention to grain, and the practical utility that informed every design choice—all culminating in a personal interpretation of a mid-century modern aesthetic.